Novacane
by LucyFoudre
Summary: Based off the eighth season episode If/Then, we follow Meredith as she tries to navigate her newly complicated life. What happens when she knows the cute guy at the bar is her boss, but she wants him anyway? How will she escape from the shadow her mother casts? And who is Meredith without a person of her own?
1. Chapter 1

Meredith Webber still had the bite of tequila on her tongue when she told her boss the residents' nickname for him. "McDreary," she said, "We call you McDreary."

He laughed, smiled, tipped his half-empty glass of scotch and took another sip. He looked tired, the darkness around his eyes standing out in the soft barroom light. She couldn't be sure she hadn't seen him laugh before, but the way the skin around his eyes bunched and the lines of his mouth stretched wide were certainly unfamiliar.

"Do you think that's funny?" she asked.

He was turning the glass on the bar in slow revolutions between his fingers, precise motions that spun it on a membrane of condensation. His smile was gone, his face the same placid surface that she had grown accustomed to when he appeared for the occasional Neurology consult. He considered his drink like he considered a screen of brain scans, his fingers gliding around the glass with the same kind of grace as if he had a scalpel in his hand.

"No," he said, more to the scotch than her. "It's apt. McDreary." He tapped the rim of the glass. "That's my life."

Meredith watched a woman sit down at a table at the back of the bar, her head bobbing in conversation behind his shoulder. To her left a table of nearly-retired oncologists drank cocktails and spoke in complaining tones. Nurses played pool in the corner. The hospital staff unwound in their off hours around her, laughing, shouting. Meredith watched as he stared down through his scotch. His eyebrows fidgeted and a muscle in his jaw jumped like he was swallowing tears. She imagined him in this bar each night, trying to unravel whatever had drove him here in the first place.

She thought of when he had smiled, that one moment when his white teeth had peeked from beneath his lips. His eyes were blue. She had never noticed before, she never had reason. He looked down so often.

"So how about tonight you're not McDreary. You're just," she said, and he was looking at her. "You're just a guy in a bar."

His mouth picked up with a twitch of hope. "And you're just a girl in a bar."

"I am." she said. "And I drink tequila." She thought of when Alex, confronted with his betrayal, had said that Cristina was a lunatic. Despite the ache in her chest she still smiled.

He called the bartender over and ordered her another drink. She sat straight, trying her best to look like she had any experience in this at all.

"Cheers," he said.

She poured the shot down her throat slowly. _A girl who drinks tequila_, she told herself. In some near future she would confidently order herself shot after shot, downing them expertly, cheered on by the bar patrons around her. She would be like those girls in college who never seemed to study, who didn't even own a bookshelf, who had to organize their earrings by color so they had a hope of finding the right ones.

April would never go for it. Meredith and April were inseparable, the two of them struggling through residency, experiencing everything together. Now Meredith knew that Alex was one more thing they had in common. He would be the last of them, though. Meredith kept the smile on her face as her boss looked at her again. She was a girl with tequila; April wasn't, never would be.

She might have been adrift, afloat, hopelessly lost in an ocean, but she just felt free.

McDreary leaned on the bar with both elbows, his head cocked, the corner of his mouth tipped up. "New at this?" he asked. "The drinking."

"Turning over a new leaf," she said.

"Was the old one so bad?" he asked. He was spinning the glass again, but instead of watching his hands he looked at her.

"I didn't used to think so," she said. After all she had agreed to marry it yesterday. "I didn't, but it was so wrong. All wrong." She pushed stray grains of salt along the bar top with her fingernail, the color of smeared blood, the shiny lacquer smudged with elbow prints.

"Funny how that works," he said, punctuating the statement with a wince.

The more she looked at him the more she saw herself. The pain in his eyes even when he smiled, the undercurrent of dark thoughts below the conversation. If this was how he felt then McDreary certainly was apt. She imagined being ten years older and still feeling this pain, still drudging away at life. She could see why he was the person her mother was always after to improve, to strive for greatness. With this sort of baggage who would want to push more than absolutely necessary?

Meredith waved her hand in the air to try to catch the bartender's attention. The man kept wiping down bottles, his back turned. McDreary laughed next to her, and she narrowed her eyes at him. He clamped his mouth shut dramatically, his cheeks twitching with more soft chuckles.

"Hey!" she shouted, and the bartender turned to her. "Two more," she said, pointing to the empty shot glass in front of her. "With limes. And him," she gestured to her boss.

"Top me off, Tom," he told the bartender.

"We should drink to something," she said.

"We do that?" he asked.

"I do." She lined the two tiny glasses up in front of her, followed by the salt shaker, the tumbler with lime wedges neatly centered in front of them. She licked the supple stretch of skin between her thumb and finger of her right hand and sprinkled it with salt. "To freedom."

"Freedom," he repeated and took a sip of his drink.

Meredith scowled at him, a wedge of lime between her teeth.

"What?" he asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

She spat the piece of fruit into her hand. "That's it?" she asked. "One little sip for freedom?"

"That's how you drink scotch." he said.

"Look," she said and tossed the lime rind on the bar, "if that's all you can muster for freedom I can find another drinking partner."

He lifted the glass and tipped the glass of scotch down his throat. "Terrible," he said, shaking his head.

Only once before had Meredith's fingertips tingled like they did then. Twelve years ago a cousin had fed her glasses of wine at a wake, and she had ended up retching in late Nana's azaleas. Her mother would not stop talking to her father about her great aunt's botched colostomy on the drive back to the hotel and Meredith thought she was going to lose it all over the floor mats. But before that, before the talk of fecal waste and the dry heaves she had perched on the floral couch in the sitting room and pressed her fingertips together, marveling at the pin pricks of numbness.

McDreary's eyes were a little clearer, though that might have been the scotch. His mouth had relaxed, spread and smoothed, not happy but not as pained as before. She could hardly see the man she avoided morning rounds with. She couldn't remember why they had drawn straws in Alex's Chief Resident office to see who would have to endure another week on his service.

"No more McDreary," she said suddenly.

He blinked his eyes and tilted his head. "No?"

She tossed her hair over her shoulder. "It doesn't suit you."

He held out his hand. "Derek, then."

"Meredith." She took his hand and it wrapped neatly around her own, the long, steady fingers hugging hers. His hands were warm. She liked knowing that.

"Nice to meet you, Meredith," he said, still holding her hand.

Her head spun a little. A couple was dancing near the jukebox, their bodies pressed tight, dusty peanut shells crunching under their shoes. He was looking at her, his eyes steady, as if he was trying to figure out who she really was. Or was that just projection, and he stared instead at a bit of food she was suddenly certain was caught in her teeth while she tried to place the person she had become. Everywhere she looked there were people she recognized from the hospital; the guy from the lab that she always argued with had just joined the nurses' pool game. Being a Webber meant her whole life had revolved around this hospital. She imagined their eyes on her, imagined them talking about the chief's daughter chatting up the married attending. Her mother would eat him alive.

"Let's go somewhere," she said, the words sluggish in her mouth, the sticky consonants collecting in her cheeks.

He hesitated a moment, his eyes on her. "I can drive," he said, dropping her hand.

"I'll meet you outside," she told him as he grabbed his coat.

The frosted glass in the restroom door was dark. No one lingered outside it, not a hint of the fabled long lines to the women's room she had always heard about. She slipped down from her stool and tripped as quickly as she could to the cool, dark little closet of a room. She felt on the wall for a switch, and when the lights came on she pulled her hand back quickly from the mottled plastic. For a place that made its money off hospital staff she thought they could stand a more rigorous cleaning regimen.

She looked at the sink. They could, at the very least, supply a bottle of hand sanitizer.

She unceremoniously took care of her needs, washed her hands, then examined herself in the mirror. She pulled her fingers through her hair, ruffled the roots, and checked again. Her hair looked just the same as always, straight and sandy and cleanly trimmed. She saw the same oval face, the pale skin, the conservative haircut she had grown used to her entire life, but there was no comfort in it anymore.

She leaned close to the mirror. The skin around her eyes was still a little puffy, the rims of her eyelids were raw from rubbing. Her cheeks were flushed with the beginnings of drunkenness, or perhaps from the handsome doctor flirting with her at the bar. The handsome married attending.

She sighed and smoothed the front of her pink button down shirt. She loved this shirt. She had the lower half of her dark pink cardigan fastened over it when she stopped, her hands hovering over the black button on her chest, when she reconsidered and undid it again. She had worn her favorite outfit today. She knew she was going to be announcing her engagement and showing off the perfect princess cut diamond ring Alex had bought her. She had stayed up late last night just to wash it and press it, giddy with nerves, reliving the night in her head. She picked out each component, the jeans that fit just right, the pink-banded watch her father bought her when she passed her intern exam, and her favorite shirt crisp and smelling of fabric softener, all hung together in her closet.

She was a fool, she thought. She was a fool and Alex was a cheating bastard and tomorrow the whole hospital would know about it as they exchanged small talk over desks and operating tables and gurneys. Tomorrow she would have to figure out what to do with the damage that was her life, but that was tomorrow. She opened the door to the bathroom and slipped across the bar, her eyes straight ahead. Tonight she was going to do exactly what she wanted to do.

Derek was sitting in a boxy monster of a vehicle, the dim dome light making his perfectly styled hair shine. She knocked on the window lightly, opened the door, and pulled herself up.

"I imagined something more," she said, pausing to let her vocabulary catch up to her, "sporty."

"Sporty would never make it up my driveway," he said with a grin.

They pulled onto the ferry just as its crew was preparing to pull away from shore. Derek's truck, as he called it, was parked safely below deck. They climbed together, their footsteps ringing hollow on the wide steel stairs, to the open air and yards of white railing.

"I didn't realize the commute you have," Meredith said, her hands on the rail in front of her, looking out at the stretch of shore beginning to slip behind them.

"I don't do this every day, but I also don't mind," he said. "I love where I live. It was part of why I stayed."

"You're from New York, right?" she said.

"Manhattan, the best place in the world," he said with a smile.

"Then why did you leave?" She could almost imagine him there, in a tailored suit, coming home and ordering Thai from a little place down the block, hailing cabs and cursing the traffic. Derek with this whole other life that must have suited him so well.

"What I had back east, well, it wasn't something I wanted anymore."

She stopped watching the waves to look at him, his hair ruffled in the wind, staring hard into the distance.

"But then it followed me here," he said. "Running didn't work. And where would I go now?"

His fists were clenched tight, his eyes on the dark horizon. His attempt at apathy had fooled most of the hospital –it had certainly fooled her mother– but she could see that this was a person waiting to explode.

"I got engaged last night," she said quietly.

"What?" he asked.

"Alex asked me to marry him." Meredith swallowed, her throat constricting painfully. "I said yes, wore the ring, the whole deal. And today Cristina walks in on him having sex with April."

"Oh, Meredith," he said, her name a long exhalation.

"She was my best friend, my person, you know? Who does that?" She looked into his worried eyes and liked him a bit more.

"You didn't marry him," he said. "It doesn't sound very comforting, but it's something."

"Yeah," she said quietly. "Instead I'm free. Just like that."

His eyes, blue like the night sky in the city, showed so much caring that it hurt to look at him. The ferry was far out into the water now and the sky was deep black and dotted with constellations. She watched the flickering of satellites as they followed in the slow rotation of the Earth.

"It really is beautiful out here," she said.

"It is." She could see him smile out of the corner of her eye. "Of course, I love a good ride on a ferryboat."

"Ferryboats," she stated flatly. "That's your thing?"

He turned toward her and leaned on the railing. "Is that weird?"

"Seattle is surrounded on three sides by water. There are ferryboats everywhere, it's a fact of life." She laughed as his smile widened. "I guess it's just so normal to me. I've lived here my whole life."

"Lucky," he said. He was closer now, close enough that she could have reached out and touched the creases in his button down shirt, rolled the soft red fabric between her fingertips. The wind was growing colder and his nearness warmed her. She looked up at him, wondered at his chin darkened with a few days of stubble, how it would feel on her skin. Alex always stayed clean-shaven, even on his days off.

His hand glided along the line of her jaw and the light touch made her shiver. His mouth was warm and firm against her cool lips. His fanned fingers found the back of her neck, and pulled her gently closer. Everywhere he touched her was solid, firm, a rock to moor herself on as she drifted.

She gripped the collar of his shirt and when he pulled away it took her a moment to remember to let go of him.

Her cell phone began to buzz with jangling chirps. Before she thought about how in this moment outside communication was unneeded, how right now she was absolutely justified in ignoring one little phone call when there wasn't a single person who could be on the other end that she would want to talk to, before any of that registered the call was accepted and the phone was pressed to her flushed cheek. Her first thought, instead, was one of absolute certainty that she was making a mistake kissing Derek Shepherd, Head of Neurosurgery.

April was saying her name.

"Where are you?" April asked. Her words tipped over each other, rushed, the diction emphatically clipped like she had taken debate team practice a little too seriously.

"It doesn't matter," Meredith said. She gripped the chipped white railing with her free hand.

"Cristina said she took you to some bar, but you weren't there." April said.

Meredith closed her eyes. _Thank you, tequila. Thank you, stupid decisions, for getting me out of there. _

"I need to talk to you, Mere. I need to tell you how sorry I am." There was a pause, a moment where Meredith could hear April suck in breath and then she was off again. "God, Mere, I am so sorry. I don't know how I, but I did, and Alex said you were so busy, and your mother–"

"That's enough." Meredith said. "I don't need to hear this. I'm not going to listen to this just so you feel better." The anger that had begun to fade, temporarily at least, with the pleasant distraction of booze and a boy came back fiercer than before. To love them, April and Alex, and for them to betray it. For what? Sex? Or was her love one-sided, a delusion, a fairy tale that only she subscribed to. She, who had believed that she had found a good man inside a crass one, cleaned him up, made them into a perfect team and waited patiently until he asked her the right question at just the right time. He waited all of a day, probably less, before he was sticking it in her best friend. April, who was there for her, who was looking for her own good man, who was waiting until her wedding night.

All of it, everything Meredith knew about these two people she loved, was a lie.

April was crying softly into the phone. Meredith thought about how she had heard that sound before, late nights just talking, pacing out the night with the phone and April on the other end mourning a relationship that wasn't, or never was, or should have been. Her heart had broken those nights. Meredith wondered if her heart would ever break like that again, or if the scars from today would lock it in fibrous bands.

"All I want," Meredith said quietly, "is to get away from you. I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear you. I want to pretend you never existed." She stared out to the black water. Moonlight flickered on the drifting planes of briny surf. "Just leave me alone."

Her phone was in her fist. Before she could change her mind she stuffed it deep into her pants pocket. She clenched her hands together in front of her, one over another, until they hurt. As much as she wanted to throw her phone into the water and imagine it sinking into the cold unknown she was still Meredith Webber, fifth year resident. She couldn't bear the thought of losing contact with the entire world, the hospital, the potential cataclysmic traumas, ex-fiancés and ex-persons be damned.

"Meredith?" Derek said softly.

She had forgotten he was next to her.

"We're almost to shore," he said.

She was absolutely there in that moment: on a ferryboat, with a man who she shouldn't have given a second thought to, in the night with its bright stars and cold, salty wind. Every instinct that she had, all her years listening to the certain, unwavering advice of her father that so far had always been perfectly reasonable and resolutely practical, it told her that she should watch Derek get off that ferryboat, say goodbye to him and whatever his problems were, listen to the chug of the engines as she motored back to shore, call a cab, and fall gratefully into her perfectly dependable bed. She could avoid her mother; that much was easy. She could assure her father that she would be alright. She could spend her day off reading a book or doing laundry, something practical and boring. Meredith's entire life crowded in and told her that her path led home. Her path had worked so far.

Except when it kept her small instead.

They sat quietly inside the car, their breath misting the windows. Meredith touched her finger where the engagement ring had been, smooth and lightly tanned, just the same as the rest of her hand. She hadn't worn it long enough for it to leave even a faint trace on her skin. She had slipped it off easily, tucked it inside a medical journal at the bottom of her locker in the resident's lounge. After a good cry on her father's shoulder she couldn't bear to wear it another minute. Her plan was to give it back. She would have to wait if she wanted that plan to remain non-violent.

Derek navigated onto a little two lane highway from the ferryboat's parking lot, his hands moving automatically on the steering wheel. The moon was rising out over the water, a bright bulb. Clouds scuffed along the rim of the sky, edges glowing, the winds mixing, the clear skies traded for more rain.

"Is it always this beautiful out here?" she asked him.

"Just wait," he said. "This is the highway, very utilitarian. I sometimes think my land was made just for the view."

"Land?" Meredith asked. She would have rather heard "house," or perhaps "living room." She imagined a stone fireplace, a wall of glass looking out to the water.

"You'll see," he said as he glanced over and smiled.

Land was the appropriate word, it turned out. At the end of the driveway at the top of the hill, where Derek pulled his truck into a compacted patch of dirt, land was almost all there was to see. Acres of grass bordered by beautiful old timber, and right in the middle, just beyond the dirt and the truck, was a small aluminum trailer. It was such a permanent fixture here that there was even a porch in front of it, nearly as wide as the trailer itself.

"You live in there?" Meredith asked.

"Most of the time, yes," he said, his smile broadening. "When I'm not at the hospital, or–"

_Or when he was with his wife_, she finished.

"You prefer the solitude? It doesn't bother you?" She approached the porch. It seemed sturdy enough.

"After being in the hospital for days? Not at all." He hopped up on the porch, bypassing the stairs Meredith was testing with the toe of her shoe. "Come in," he said, "if you want to."

The inside of the trailer was cramped, that much she expected, but it was far less barren than she imagined. The light Derek flicked on over the sink made the place seem warm, despite the lack of heating. The curtains were simple and neat, the kitchen table folded away, the bathroom tiny but well stocked.

Then there was the matter of the bed. By Meredith's estimate it took up a third of the trailer. The sheets looked like they would have been right at home in Derek's Manhattan life. The comforter looked like something out of a design magazine. She smirked as she thought that there should be puppies tumbling across it, too good to be true, that those puppies should have come along in the box with his bedding.

"I thought," Derek said, close behind her, "that we could work out some sort of sleeping arrangement."

"That's an interesting way of putting it," Meredith said. As she looked at that bed, blood red sheets folded back, while Derek stood just close enough, she imagined her father. This was the least appropriate time to think of him, but part of having him always there was that he led her even when she didn't ask. Her father was telling her to go, that this was a terrible idea. She crossed her arms over her chest. He thought she was throwing away her career. She frowned. He knew just what she should do, had it planned since she had gotten in the truck. Surely Derek was enough of a gentleman to give her a ride back to that ferryboat.

The problem with her father's advice, she thought, was that it always delayed pleasure. Stop crying, get back on that bike and finish what you started. Earn good grades to get into a good high school, earn good SAT scores to get into a good college, focus and ignore everything and everyone. On and on until she was at Seattle Grace Hospital living for her career and her parents and the applause at awards ceremonies rather than herself.

"I don't know what I was thinking," Derek whispered, still close enough behind her that she could feel his slow, steady breaths moving her hair.

Meredith turned. He was shaking his head.

"I thought we were past it, that we could fix things." He ran a hand through his hair, which settled into the same controlled chaos as before. "I thought it was my fault."

"Your wife?" she asked quietly.

"I told her I wanted a baby, that baby. And I did. Seven months and I was ready." He paced, taking a couple steps away from her, then closer again, then back. "She kept asking, kept pushing me, and then she just took it away." He placed his hands on either side of the door and locked his arms, leaning against the curved metal wall. "The baby isn't mine. Did you know that?" The veins in his arms pulsed.

"I–" Meredith began, but there was no good way to finish that. It was common knowledge in the hospital that the Shepherds were going through a rough patch, had been for months, but she didn't know any of this. She suspected that no one did, not yet. She thought about Percy complaining about the pair earlier, how she didn't want her relationship to be the next Shepherds. She ended up with something like it anyway.

"This is my life?" he asked her, his eyes shining. "Flirting with you in a bar was the highlight of my day, my week. What does that mean?"

The trailer was so tiny she only had two steps to take before she could reach for his hands, pulling him away from the door. He looked at the floor, just like she saw every day in the hospital, the defeat closing in.

"It means," she said, pausing, collecting her thoughts, trying to get her father's advice to do her some good tonight, "that you're free."

"Free," he said. "If I'm free then what do I do?"

"You just have to breathe," she said, putting her hands on the sides of his face, the stubble tickling her palms. "Just be."

His mouth was warm, soft, his lips trembling slightly as she kissed him, light caresses one after another. His lips parted and he leaned into her, his hands in her hair. She threaded her fingers in his tie, loosening the knot, tossing it into the darkness beyond their electric bodies. His hands were in her hair again, tugging at the roots. She tipped her head back and his mouth warmed her neck. She looked out the skylight just above her head, the night stars bright through the dirty acrylic dome. She sighed as his lips pressed to her collarbone.

His fingers loosened their hold on her scalp. She caught his mouth with hers again, and as he straightened she caught the waistband of his pants. Her heart thudded in her ears as she stepped back, pulled him with her until the backs of her knees felt the gentle give of the comforter spread across his bed. He looked at her, his pupils wide with desire, and pushed her gently back.

His weight pressed her into the mattress, his warmth surrounded her, his mouth opened hers and his tongue plunged deep. He shifted, his hands on either side of her head, and his fingertips stroked her cheeks. She ran her hands down his sides, the bands of muscle under her palms flexing, bending, his body in lustful agitation. She tilted her hips toward him and he pressed the ridge of his erection against her. Her throat buzzed with a low, feral moan.

He was everywhere, his body covered hers insistently even as he supported his weight above her. The friction of his clothed body against hers didn't allow for anything but sensation, her mind overflowed with the heated messages of nerve endings instead of thought. She bowed under him, wanting more of this anesthetic, hungry for the high of bare skin.

Buttons were no impediment to her hands, even as Meredith trembled with adrenaline. The dark hairs furring the top of his chest were soft under her fingertips, the dip of his clavicle damp with sweat. He tugged at her tight jeans as he kissed around her navel, she lifted her hips and he pulled off the last of her clothing, tossing them into the kitchen behind him.

"Meredith," he said, her name a gust of breath from between his flushed lips.

"Don't stop," she said.

He stood, silhouetted, and she wished she could see all of him. He leaned into the bathroom and she saw the shape of the condom in his fingers. She memorized the triangles of light that gleamed between his forearms and the subtle tuck of his waist. He crawled toward her, covered her again, and she put her hands where the light had been.

"Meredith," he said again, his eyes locked with hers.

She hooked her knees on his hips, her ankles crossing behind him. "I want this," she said.

"You do?" he asked.

"So much," she said, and she kissed him again.

She closed her eyes as she felt the warm pressure of his skin on hers, the thump of his heart against hers, the push of his urgent inhalations fighting against hers. The air in her lungs hummed joyously out as she expanded for his entrance, her body adjusting to his, her clit grinding against his hard pelvis. He stayed close, moved in short bursts, let her nerves light up.

Derek's hands were threaded through her hair when she convulsed, groaned, and pushed against him in her climax. He kept very still as she contracted around him, and began to slowly stroke the skin of her shoulders with his thumbs as she quieted. She smiled up at him, her eyelids heavy.

"More?" he asked. She nodded and pushed against his chest with her palms.

He rolled onto his back and she tucked herself into his side. He ran a hand over her breast, cupping it and she closed her eyes as he toyed with her sensitive flesh, rousing her sated nerves. She pushed herself up and over him, straddling him with her knees, brushing the twitching tip of his erection with the slick lips of her labia. He put his hands on her hips and closed his eyes, his smile disappearing into concentration. She leaned forward and slid onto him, taking all of him, gripping him hard. She watched as he inhaled through his clenched teeth, his fingers pressing into the flesh of her hips, and his desire moved her, up and down, her eyes never leaving his face as she watched him give over to his own needs.

He opened his eyes, pupils large and dark, and she could see worship there, worship of what she could give or deny him as she chose. She sat up straight, stretched her spine as she towered high above him. Her pleasure tonight was hers to own, to control absolutely. She moved faster, the friction building, spreading inside her like hot oil, fire concentrated around him, her body painfully aware of every point where they pulled together. She put her hands on his chest and he moaned, a long, luxurious noise in the back of his throat, and his hips jerked under her. They moved together, both chasing their desire relentlessly, until she tossed her head back and rode the wave of orgasm. Meredith contracted fiercely and he thrust upwards, once. Her body arched back in response and he groaned his release loudly into the night.

She curled her body against his side, her hair splayed across the pillow behind her. Derek closed his eyes, made a low, purring hum of pleasure in the back of his throat. He rested his cheek against her forehead, their damp skin cooling together, and she let his deep, even breaths lull her to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

The sounds of the city were far away. Perhaps it was all the trees, the thick trunks and stretching branches catching the noises of cars and conversations in dense, woody nets. Perhaps the rustle of leaves disguised the hum of traffic, the chirps of birds distracted from the sirens. The throbbing heart of downtown wasn't far away, just short ferry ride, but its reach didn't extend to this little corner of Bainbridge Island.

Meredith wrapped her borrowed coat around her tightly. Habits were hardly disrupted with one night of drinking; she had cracked an eye open at dawn. The sheets had been cool beyond the warm cocoon she had curled into. A note was taped to the bathroom door: Had to check on a patient, be back soon. Soft light came through the cotton curtains on the windows. On the porch a cool, damp wind blew her tangled hair away from her face. A low pulse of pain throbbed at her temple. _Dehydration_, she thought, _just a hangover_. She should go inside and find a glass, grab a drink from the tap, but she didn't move. The reminder from last night was a comfort.

She tried to sort out the last twenty-four hours in her mind. The muscles of her thighs felt like worn hair elastics, slipping over hard bones. She remembered why she was standing outside a little aluminum trailer staring across acres of roughly trimmed grass, remembered everything that happened in that little metal bubble. That was just the outcome, however, of a day that she still couldn't quite grasp.

She wasn't sure if she was glad she was only engaged for the better part of a day. She knew she should be, that the pain was better tolerated this way. Derek had said something last night about it being better that she hadn't married Alex, and she was sure that he meant well. What she couldn't shake was how easy it was to walk away. If they had married there would be negotiations, a ritual to follow. It was silly; she was sure if she was faced with a messy divorce she wouldn't think she was lucky. But for all she and Alex had been, for that to be gone so fast, for them to be in the past tense without a single moving van or lawyer's visit, it just seemed too easy.

She was being melodramatic, yet wasn't that supposed to happen with a broken heart?

A spatter of mist hit her neck and she shivered, hugged herself further into the flannel coat she had snatched off the hook by the door. It was so quiet, much more quiet than she was used to living in the tightly packed old neighborhood she had grown up in. No noise of lawnmowers or putter of failing mufflers, no children's cries, no mothers' calls. The wind whistled slightly, the leaves rustled on the trees. This was a place to think.

Meredith began walking toward the tree line as the wind picked up. The rush of air in her ears made her feel like she was wearing earmuffs, the voice in her mind raised over the white noise. She had pushed her way into surgery yesterday like it was her right, as if she had half the passion for Cardio that Cristina did. She asked to be in the OR knowing her attending would give the daughter of the chief anything she wanted. Meredith walked along the edge of the grass under the trees, little clusters of dead leaves swirling near her feet as the wind pushed them on. Most of the attendings would give her what she wanted. No, that wasn't right, they were giving her mother what she wanted. Whether Meredith wanted it or not was irrelevant, she was just the catalyst her mother sent out to do her bidding, to politely insist that she get this privilege or that opportunity. She was a vessel for her mother's aspirations, a test case to see what Ellis Grey could have been if she had been born a couple decades later.

Meredith went along with it, just as she always had. She really did want in on that surgery, she was a scalpel junkie like the rest of the residents. She had the added benefit of her mother, a mother who said she was good for Cardio. A mother who sent her father to clean up after her, to smooth the edges of her rough guidance. Ellis Grey may have been Chief of Surgery, may have been the world class surgeon, may have been a goddess amongst mortals, but her father was the one holding the mortals at bay. Richard Webber was the PR guy, the guy who knew all the right words, who could take the ugly stone of Ellis's words and find the diamond inside, who could persuade them all that she was working in their best interest.

Meredith scowled into the cool, moist wind. They had bought it, all of her friends and colleagues, and her mother sailed her tight ship with the press snapping pictures of her stoic profile as Richard pulled the strings deep below deck. Meredith had told him yesterday that he was small, that Ellis kept him that way. She had said she wasn't going to be small like him.

In the early morning light miles away from everything she had grown used to, with her tears dry and the throb of a hangover prodding her sluggish brain into activity, she knew that she was done with the Ellis Grey propaganda machine. She could not close her eyes and pretend she didn't know what was going on. Her mother only acted in her own interest, nothing more. She knew that now. Her mother used her father to cover for her own selfishness, she knew that too. She just had to find a way to exist in this new world.

Meredith walked toward a break in the trees. The land ahead looked as if it dropped away, and once the trees thinned she could see Seattle across the Puget Sound. The familiar shades of neighborhoods, the mottled mosaic of roofs and clapboard slipping into the steel and concrete city center was a comfort. She had grown up here, had flown in and out of its airport and seen these roofs from ten thousand feet of homesickness when she returned, and yet she wasn't sure if it was the familiarity or the distance that was comforting her now. Would she be able to resolve herself to a new path this morning if she was looking at the same walls of her bedroom that greeted her every morning? Could she reconcile the mother she was determined to escape with the one who used to kiss her forehead late at night? Could she be a new Meredith in Seattle when she was surrounded by the old?

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. The break in the woods must have given her a brief trace of signal from a tower in the city. The wind rushed in her ears as she scrolled through the list of texts: two from Cristina, five from her father, and one from Alex. Last night her father wanted her home, this morning he hoped she had slept well. His last message said he told the hospital not to call, that she was taking the day off properly, and if she wanted in on some incoming trauma to let him know. However her world had shifted and tilted yesterday she smiled to think that her father was still a good man. That was what made him so valuable to Ellis, it made her poison pills easier to swallow if they came from such a caring hand.

Cristina was amused that suddenly she was sought after as to the whereabouts of one Meredith Webber. "They will be off your back for now," she said, "but you better tell me where you went that's so interesting. And it better be good." If there was one thing Meredith felt guilty about, it was making a pariah of the sort of person who would tell April that she was passed out on the couch just so she would shut up. She certainly didn't deserve anything from Cristina.

There were three simple words from Alex: _Please call me_. Leave it to him to ask for something in spite of everything.

"I hope you didn't miss anything important," Derek said, walking up behind her. The wind rushing in her ears was loud enough to cover the noise of his arrival and she jumped. "The reception here is spotty at best. Part of the charm, I think."

"It's my day off," she said, "but you knew that."

"I checked the board, you aren't missing anything. I even stopped by the pit, but Hunt said it had been a routine morning." He smiled at her, crossed his arms over his wool coat and shook his head. "I see you took my coat."

"Borrowed," she said. "I wasn't planning on being out in the wilderness when I left home yesterday."

"Fair enough," he replied. "Hungry?"

She nodded and they started to walk toward the trailer, the soft gleam of its curved roof just visible in a gap in the trees.

"The view is amazing," she said. "Why isn't the trailer here instead?" She pictured the view, the city spread out behind them now in soft morning light, blue and gray in the mist. She peeked over her shoulder. She wasn't sure she could ever get enough of it.

"I have plans," he said, "dreams really. Or I will have plans." He looked back at her, nodding toward the spot he had found her. "For a house, that is."

"You mean you don't intend to live in a trailer forever?" she asked.

"No." His stride was long, his gate jaunty, and Meredith had to make quick, skipping steps to keep up.

They sat the the tiny kitchen table and sorted through the danishes Derek brought with him from the city. "I felt bad leaving you here this morning. I don't keep much food here. No point really, when I eat at the hospital most of the time," he said, a blueberry danish in his hand, waving along with his gestures.

"I hadn't even thought of eating," she said.

"Too much else going on?" He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, his eyes not leaving her face.

"Oh no," she said, "we aren't getting into my problems." She took a determined bite of her danish and chewed slowly. "Tell me about your house," she said after she had swallowed.

"Big windows looking out over the Sound. A porch that wraps around the other three sides, big enough to have half the hospital over for a barbecue. A master suite with the biggest, fluffiest bed you can imagine and a tub for two." He smiled, his gaze distant as he pictured it. "I have it down to where the kids' rooms will be," he said, and swallowed, "when I get around to having any, that is."

"Do you have blueprints?" she asked.

"Not yet," he said. "Addison didn't like the idea, preferred living in town. She kept finding ways of putting off finding an architect, she always had other uses for the money I wanted to spend. Then the baby, well, I didn't think I had time anymore." He smiled sadly at her. "I suppose I'm free to move ahead with it, aren't I?"

"You are," Meredith said, nodding.

"Your father says I need to start a clinical trial, though, stay competitive, keep your mother from tossing me out."

"Say what you want about my mother, but she does know how to make a career," Meredith said.

"Which is why I am going to work on it," he replied. "That is, as long as she feels the hospital can still hold both Dr. Shepards."

"You think she would do that?" Meredith asked.

"Your mother is a terrifying person." Derek took another bite of his danish. "And she hates me."

"Luckily you're talking to her daughter," Meredith said, smirking.

"You can't think that I have you out here to save my job." He stared at her, frowning slightly. "You don't think that."

"No," she said, "but you can't deny that there's something of a shade of nepotism to my mother."

"She cares about her family," Derek said simply. "I can understand that."

"She does." Meredith set her breakfast down. "In her own way, yes."

"You can talk to me, you know." Derek tilted his head, the corners of his eyed crinkled slightly. His voice was soft when he said, "We could be friends."

"A friend wouldn't make me talk about my stuff right now," she said.

"You need a friend," he stated.

"I have friends!" she said with a little too much emphasis. "I have," she began, but it took a moment too long to come up with a name. "Cristina," she said, "Cristina is my friend."

"Yang?" His eyebrows raised. "She's almost as scary as your mother."

"She's the reason the cavalry isn't out here right now. She covered for me, said I was passed out on her couch so no one would come looking for me." She stared at him as his eyebrows rose further.

"You told her you were here?" he said, paling slightly.

"No. Now stop judging my friends." She frowned at him.

Derek laughed. "Alright. So Yang is your friend. Why not have two friends?"

"I can only deal with so much," she said.

"I am too much?" he asked.

"Too much."

"Then," he said, leaning back, his demeanor every bit the cocky attending type that she saw every day around the hospital, "you won't have any trouble telling me what to do about this clinical trial."

"What do you want to be told?" she asked.

"I always thought that I would try to cure Alzheimer's. When I was a resident I saw these attendings with their old ideas, their slow progress. I thought I had something different, that I was destined for a breakthrough. I had all these ideas, you know, read all the latest research." He stared down at his hands, one still holding the last bite of pastry, and sighed.

"So cure Alzheimer's," she said. "The funding would be easy."

"That's the thing," he said, "the passion is gone. Years ago, I don't know how, but it's gone from all my work."

Meredith remembered when he had come from Manhattan. It was hard to forget, really, as her mother had secured him just before she began her internship. She could still hear the excitement in her voice as she discussed the benefits of having a world-class neurosurgeon to head the department. It was funny, in a sad way, that the residents seemed to have forgotten altogether that they were working with such an apparently gifted man, instead complaining about his attitude and his marriage and his soul-crushing schedule of routine procedures.

"You don't love Neuro anymore?" she asked. To her, having spent her whole life working toward a career she didn't even have yet, it felt unspeakable. Already most of the people she had grown up with were married and had kids. Some had even managed to get divorced by now. They had mortgages and vacations and babysitters and she was still creating her life, working ninety hours a week when she could get away with it, reading about the latest procedures being developed in her specialty when she couldn't. Her entire life was a build up to what he had, and to find that thing that had driven her so far was gone would be unbearable.

"I do love it," he said, "or I think I do."

"Maybe it's all the laminectomies," she said.

He looked up at her, confused.

"It might be the stents," she added.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"It's all you do. Boring stuff. The residents hate you for it."

"They do?" Despite the news, which he should have thought terrible, he smiled a bit.

"Well, how would you have liked it when you were a resident, with all that passion, to spend your time in the OR draining spinal fluid?" Meredith raised an eyebrow and he laughed.

"I removed a tumor from a baby today," he said. "A massive tumor," he clairified, "although Dr. Percy could have refrained from saying that in front of the mother."

"Did that do anything for you?" Meredith asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Addison was there, we were arguing, and it was like my hands were working without me."

"Apparently you and Charles were preoccupied with the same thing," she said with a laugh.

"Addison?" he asked.

"No one wants to work with both of the Shepherds," she said.

Derek nodded and made a low humming grunt in agreement. "My marriage is a menace," he said with a sad smile.

"Oh," Meredith said with a snort, "like we have suffered more than you."

"Good point," he said. He ran his hand over the thick, wavy hair just above his ear.

Meredith stood, abandoning the last bite of her breakfast on the table. "I need to get home," she said.

"I'll give you a ride," he countered.

"Just to the ferry," she said. "The whole hospital doesn't need to know where I've been."

"You were just spending time with a friend," he said softly.

Despite herself, she smiled at him as he opened the door.


	3. Chapter 3

Meredith was running late for the first time in her life. She dropped her purse to the bench, already reaching for a clean set of scrubs in her cubby. Her sweater over her head, she did not notice the huddle of residents around the bulletin board behind her. She was hopping on one foot, pulling off her tan leather oxford, sneaker wedged in her armpit awaiting the trade-off, when she heard Cristina's raised voice.

"Like it matters," Cristina said. "I'm on Cardio."

"It says that we get the surgery of our choice," April said, her voice high, "in any specialty."

"Looks like you're in this too, Yang," Alex said.

"In what?" Meredith asked, pulling on her second shoe. There was silence, then shuffling behind her. No one had noticed her late entrance.

Meredith turned and four of her coworkers stared at her. Only Cristina looked away, instead sending a smirk at the group's apparent discomfort. Meredith walked toward them and they stepped aside, Alex and April parting like the Red Sea, revealing a sheet of hospital stationery pinned to the wall.

Her mother was starting a new trial. In her life Meredith had heard about so many new trials that she could mark them like school years, their lifespans passing with reassuring regularity. If anyone had asked her she could have told them to expect it. By the time the press had latched on to Ellis' newest technique she was ready to try out the next, already tired of the routine of testing and practicing the old one. Meredith knew her mother's mind never rested, never grew comfortable with what it had already mastered. She had heard her mother rolling and sighing in the night, had seen the hall light click on and felt the floorboards shift as Ellis went downstairs for a glass of water, her mind turning a problem over and over, searching for the seam with which to pry it apart. Sometimes when Meredith missed her, when she had enough of dinners alone, she would follow Ellis to the kitchen.

"Chief Grey wants us to monitor her post-op pancreatic patients for fistulas," Percy said, his eyes shifting from Meredith's to the empty space above her head and back again.

"Whoever has the lowest complication rate gets the surgery of their choice," Cristina finished, clipping her badge on the lapel of her white jacket. "And we all know who's flying solo on a Humpty Dumpty when this is over."

While the other residents fought over who was the clear favorite to win the latest competition Meredith caught them eying her. Percy was in for a shot at trying the newest Grey Method as long as neither Shepherd was in the room and Jackson wanted in on Peds instead of dealing with junkies for the third time this week. Alex was sure no one else could handle the wrath of Ellis Grey like he could, but as soon as he caught Meredith's eye the words died in his mouth.

"What do you want if you win, Meredith?" April asked just as the room went quiet.

Yang rolled her eyes in the corner, her blunt bangs wobbling over her raised eyebrows. Meredith envied her. Cristina didn't have anything invested in any of the people in this room, and no matter any of their choices she would sail out of here with her heart intact. Not just that, but that Cristina knew exactly what she wanted. She had been talking about being a primary surgeon on a cardiac autotransplantation, a Humpty Dumpty procedure, since their third year. Meredith knew that once she gained that trophy she would set her sights higher. Whoever had their heart sliced open and sutured shut by Cristina was a lucky patient.

Cristina was a laser who had known she needed to be a Cardio god since puberty; Meredith was a floodlight. She performed procedures cleaner than the attendings and followed every step to the letter, but her every thought wasn't bent toward revolutionizing heart repairs. She didn't dream of a heart in a box, pumping away, pushing blood into tubes instead of a living, breathing body. She wasn't sure she dreamed of anything anymore. Once she had dreamed of Alex, of a house of her own, of children someday, of the smile on her father's face when he held his first grandchild. Once she had thought she knew what the future held. Now she knew she had been a fool to think she could wear a ring and know who would be there when her heart stopped beating.

Meredith took a breath, then sucked in a deeper one. April was staring at her, her face full of guilt, her question still unanswered. How was Meredith supposed to know what she wanted when her world had changed so completely? As she walked out the door she reminded herself that she was a doctor, a good one, and she didn't have a choice but to get through this day. Her work was what she was. This hospital was the one thing she could count on.

Meredith was trying for positive thoughts, some half-assed greatest hits of motivational quotes she always meant to write in eyeliner on her mirror, when the elevator she was waiting for arrived. The stairs would have been a better idea. She snorted, her crossed arms dropping to her sides. This had to be some kind of joke, she thought. Or maybe he was going to turn into a stalker, standing in elevators, skulking around with his hands draped casually in the pockets of his lab coat. That seemed like her sort of luck lately.

"Dr. Webber," Derek said, nodding as she entered.

She turned her back to him, the doors closing perilously close to her face. Now was not a good time. She jabbed at the button for her destination, the smell of him washing toward her in the torturous little box.

"Meredith?" he asked.

The smell of him, the same smell of the sheets yesterday when she woke, made her ache. She could feel him behind her, how he shifted his weight, the heat radiating off his body. She barely knew him, had spent less than a day with him, and yet her whole body prickled with the knowledge of him.

He was married, his wife was having someone else's baby. His whole world must be falling apart. She didn't need his problems when she had her own horrible day to deal with. What he was going through must be excruciating and she wouldn't make it any better. He didn't need the complication of her in his life. They didn't need the whole hospital to know.

The elevator started to move and she turned. She allowed herself to look at him. Just one look into his eyes, him looking back, an eyebrow raised slightly. She would look at him and it would have to be enough.

Her hand, whatever her resolution might have been, reached up and brushed the perfect coif sculpted above that cocky, raised eyebrow. Then his mouth was on hers, or hers were on his, it was hard to tell. His hands were out of his pockets, pressing into her arms, dragging her against him even as she pushed forward into his body. Her fingers clenched in his hair, needing more of his mouth assaulting hers, his teeth on her lower lip, the taste of his minty breath.

He had her against the wall, his hands running over her sides. The stubble on his chin made her shudder. He groaned quietly in the back of his throat, a low purring that reminded her of arching, reaching, a noise that made the cramped elevator sweltering. Meredith's stomach felt like it was in her chest next to her fluttering, banging heart.

The elevator dinged as it reached her stop. The world settled in her mind, waiting just outside the heavy silver doors. He lifted his head, his lips no more than an inch from hers, but that was all she needed to slip away. She sucked in a shaky breath and did her best not to break into a sprint as the elevator doors opened. She didn't look back, but she heard him calling out behind her.

At the nurses' station they handed her three charts, all pancreatic post-ops, all part of her mother's new scheme. Her mouth felt hot, swollen and rubbed raw. She couldn't get the feel of it out of her mind, the weight of him, his hands brushing along the sides of her breasts, the way he occupied every corner of the universe when he touched her, blocking out the bad day, the ex-friends.

"Intern's work," Yang grunted as she took her stack of fat binders from the woman behind the desk, "but for a Humpty Dumpty I'll make do."

"Like hell you're winning this one," Meredith said, pressing her lips together to stop the tingling, flipping through the notes on one of her patients.

"Oh," said Cristina, her eyebrows darting up under her bangs, "you think I'm going to go easy on you, huh?" She smirked. "Poor Meredith needs charity now?"

"No," Meredith said, "I'm just going to beat you."

"I still want to know where you were while I was fielding calls from the Clingy Squad," Cristina said.

Meredith raised an eyebrow. They were creating terminology for her twisted life now?

Cristina laughed, the sound mirthless and hard. "Karev and Kepner, all 'I'm just concerned,' and 'She could be dead in a ditch,' and 'We've never even drank in a bar before.'" Cristina had a talent for impersonations of Meredith's former fan club, and while Cristina made retching noises to punctuate her disgust Meredith cracked a wry smile.

"So," Cristina continued, "What's the story?"

Meredith's smile faltered and she tipped her head closer to the chart she was flipping through. "It was just a guy," she said.

"A guy," Cristina echoed. "I'm sort of proud of you."

"Uh, thanks," Meredith said, "I guess."

"Was it hot?" Cristina said, tucking her charts under her arm, her full attention on Meredith's face. "I bet it was hot. Was he hot?"

"Yeah," Meredith said. "He was totally hot." Maybe she was oxygen deprived from the elevator. Maybe kissing Derek Shepherd killed brain cells. Whatever it was, it wasn't good. Suddenly she was doing things that she would never decide to do. She was a doctor, logic was her best trait, so why was she now a hormone-filled teenager in scrubs?

The morning was labs and chart notes and jokes with Cristina. They bounced ideas off each other about how to keep their patients out of the OR until Cristina began dreaming up elaborate prophylactic procedures. Meredith had to sneak off down the hall lest anyone overhear and think she enjoyed torturing her patients. _She may be good for a laugh_, Meredith thought, _but she's still Yang_.

Meredith was jogging down a quiet back hallway, looking over her shoulder in case Cristina decided to follow and elaborate on how cutting people open was going to keep them from developing more holes in vital organs, when she heard a giggle echo off the bare walls. She stopped, her sneakers squeaking. It reminded her of April, the ridiculous little noise she would make when a cute boy talked to her.

There it was again, a high-pitched titter, a low rustle.

There was a closet nearby that the night janitors used. She discovered it near the end of her intern year. Alex had been softening her up, dragging her into dark corners and kissing her until her legs didn't want to hold her up, when he ushered her into this particular nook. She had asked him later how he knew no one would come in, their secret flirtation safe from the gossips for now, and him safe from the scorn of her mother. He shook his head and gave her a line, kissed her until she couldn't remember what she had been asking. He did that a lot then. That was first year, though, and she had long since rehabilitated him, made him into the man that was a shoe-in for Chief Resident. He wasn't the frat boy anymore, the guy the other interns were embarassed of, the guy who inspired the nurses to band together just to deny his wandering lust.

That was then. That was history. That's what she had told herself for years. That was behind him. Except it wasn't, and maybe it never had been.

She heard a groan. Maybe every nurse in the hospital knew what that closet was good for but she couldn't ignore the knot in her stomach that told her that even if it wasn't Alex and April in that closet right now that didn't mean it wasn't them yesterday, or last week.

Meredith was running again, the balls of her feet bouncing against the hard linoleum, farther away from the noises and the memories and the facts she didn't want to face. She ran from the one friend she had because Yang was still Yang and she wasn't in the mood to laugh.

She couldn't see where she was going, she kept closing her eyes to block out the visions of the tangled, naked bodies in that little room. She supposed that was why the warm hands on her shoulders took her by surprise, though she didn't fight when they began to drag her out of the hallway. The images in her head distracted her, she didn't recognize the voice in her ear saying her name soft and low. She was standing, the air cool and quiet except her name murmuring again and again around her, her eyes and fists squeezed tight. The hands that petted her hair as it slipped back to the knot at the nape of her neck felt familiar. Her father had never done this, had always preferred hugs, nor was it something Ellis did the few times she had acted maternal.

Those hands, in the dark, stroking her just that way, smelling of sex and booze as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Their touch had petted her awake but it felt so good. She didn't want him to stop, didn't want him to speak, didn't want to remember anything outside that moment, so she stilled her breaths and let his fingers slip along her scalp and let herself slip back into sleep.

Her eyes opened as she remembered his face in the dark, those fingers, her pale thighs in the first light coming in the window. The night layered seamlessly on the early afternoon light coming in the wide windows of the empty patient room, the antiseptic tinge in the air awaiting a new admission.

"Derek," she said, her voice low, her heart beating hard in her chest. "Dr. Shepherd."

"Meredith," he said, the syllables sliding from his lips as if he had breathed them that way a hundred times. Perhaps he had, perhaps hours had passed as she chased away memory after memory.

She stepped back, his hands dropping to his sides. "Everywhere I go reminds me. Every memory of him, every place I kissed him makes me wonder if she kissed him there too." She sucked in a breath, her lungs aching, her whole body screaming suddenly with the exhaustion of keeping herself together all morning. "I thought if I could just stay away from them, take my time, it would be manageable. If I could limit my exposure, it would be alright. I'm not alright, Derek. I can't get away from them. They're in my head, they're everywhere."

"Is that why you kissed me in the elevator?" he asked.

"You kissed me," she said.

His smile twitched at the corners with the effort it took. "It was nice to forget for a minute, wasn't it? To have everything else fade away."

"It's the easy way out." She couldn't stand his sad eyes, the way she could read every moment of hurt that Addison had caused there. She hated more that she cared, that she wanted to make him stop hurting, this man who had taken her pain away in stolen minutes.

"Meredith," he said again, as if he needed to say her name in case they forgot who they were. "Meredith," he said and stepped closer, one hand tipping her chin up.

"No." This wasn't how she imagined it, getting over Alex. She didn't imagine being some man's distraction from his disintegrating marriage. "Your wife—"

"—has left." he finished. "She told me that night, with Mark standing there, but I didn't really believe it. That she would just leave her job, her home of five years, I didn't believe her. Maybe that was my problem." He looked down, his jaw working, just as he had that night in the bar when he had called his life dreary.

"My mother didn't say anything," Meredith said.

"She will find out soon enough," Derek said. "She put the key to the condo and divorce papers on my desk an hour ago. Once Chief Grey gets back to her office I'm sure Addison's resignation will be there to greet her."

"She's left. Just like that," Meredith said. The gossip would be vicious as soon as word got out.

"She's doing the right thing, really," he said. "She's going back to Manhattan to raise her child with its father."

He reached out, his fingers running along the edge of her jaw. "I still say you kissed me," he said, quietly, as he stepped toward her. "Let's make it even," he whispered, his breath warm on her lips as he lowered his head.

She closed her eyes, letting him suck and nibble on her lower lip. The heat of him seeped through the thin cotton of her light blue scrubs, loosening her tight, weary muscles. Meredith sighed into his mouth and felt her body come alive. She reveled in the familiar sensation, something she had found with other boys, with Alex, but never so totally outside of reason, of conscious choice in a suitable mate. She lost herself in the chaos.

For a minute the pain was gone. Then she remembered his sad eyes, how his face changed when he spoke about his marriage, the child he had lost without ever really having it. His mouth was hungry on hers and she struggled to think, to feel, even while she desperately needed to escape her life just a little longer.

"Derek," she said softly against his lips. "Derek, I can't do this."

He pulled away, his gaze hazy. His eyes were on her lips, his need apparent.

"I can't be your anesthetic," she said. "It isn't good for us. We need to deal with our lives."

He shook his head a little, blowing out a breath. "You're right," he said.

"Of course I am," she said as she slipped out the door.

She was pulling the door shut when she heard her name again, this time all sharp edges and hard stops. She spun.

"Mom," she said. Her mother's attention had always been so startling that the syllable popped from her lungs unbidden. Just a simple statement of fact, their relationship summed up.

"I need you on the incoming Cardio case from Boston." Ellis stared into Meredith's eyes, sizing her up as she had so many times. Meredith used to think that it was looks like this that prepared her to be a surgeon, scrutinized at every turn. She told herself that it didn't matter if she measured up, but it was a hard line to maintain when she was struggling under the gaze of her boss.

An old friend had sent their case to Ellis, and this was her chance to show the east coast what her Cardio team could do. A world-renowned surgeon has many friends, Meredith thought, and she had no doubt that her mother wanted nothing more than to show off the talents of her only daughter. Talent, however, was the one thing she would debate here. She was a robot, programmed down to the suture by her mother. Ellis wanted her to take point on a VIP, and it occurred to Meredith that if this was the treatment that Very Important People got at Seattle Grace then the hospital had some serious flaws.

Ellis, once satisfied, strode down the hall toward another situation that needed her less-than-gentle touch. Meredith had her back pressed to the door, the head of Neurosurgery still contained in the room behind her, when she heard him laugh.

"A Humpty Dumpty, huh?" he said through the door, and she dashed away, her face hot and head down.


	4. Chapter 4

Meredith chewed each bite of sandwich slowly, letting the noise in her head drown out the wet, harsh breaths coming from the bed. Mr. Smith was a godsend. Catatonic from multiple strokes and now cycling through a greatest hits of hospital-borne pathogens, he was an ideal lunch date. He didn't listen to the nurses' gossip, or anything for that matter, which saved Meredith from any pitying looks. He didn't ask questions, only occasionally asking for his mother whom Meredith assumed had long since passed. At eighty-five he didn't inspire much urgency in the surgical floor staff, leaving Meredith long, leisurely gaps to spend eating her lunch, or reading the overnight notes on her pancreatic patients, or napping and waiting for her pager to wake her. She was ashamed to admit it, but Mr. Smith was probably the best friend she had.

Cristina was no longer talking to her, outside snarky barbs, after she found out about the Humpty Dumpty. When Meredith was told that she was taking the case she hadn't seen room for disagreement. Not only would she anger her boss, but she would have to hear about it when she went home for the night, if not from her mother herself, then from her father, concerned for her career and for family harmony. Harmony meant keeping Ellis happy. So Meredith went along with it, even though she wanted to point out that Cristina would be a better shining light for SGH than she was beginning to think she would ever be.

She took a bite of her apple. The cart closest to the door in the cafeteria was mostly deli sandwiches and in the rush to pay and retreat back to Mr. Smith's room she grabbed the nearest piece of fruit in the basket by the register. As shiny as it was the apple tasted like cardboard. Meredith bit off another hunk, willing herself to eat enough that she wouldn't need to again until she could raid the kitchen at home. Three days she had sat in the stiff green vinyl chair next to Mr. Smith's door, listening to the hospital go on without her. Three days she thought about the Humpty Dumpty, her mother, her life. Three days wasn't much.

If she had just been a bit brave maybe she would have told her mother to give the surgery to Cristina. Then, when had she ever really been brave? Being the daughter of Ellis Grey had opened so many doors for her that all she had ever had to do was show up and be herself. Get good grades, her father told her, and she had done it. Keep your legs together, her mother told her, and she had more or less done that too. Ellis carved the path and Meredith followed, took their advice, made all the right choices. There was no adversity in it, no struggle. Meredith had the world handed to her and was expected to make more of it than her mother. A stronger specialty, flashier, with all the room in the world for improvement and Meredith might win five Harper Averies to Ellis' four. Ellis cracked the glass ceiling; it followed that Meredith would rocket straight through.

Meredith had been groomed to shine even brighter than Ellis at her peak, yet she couldn't see it. She respected her mother, who had fought so hard in a profession filled with men, pushing twice as hard, learning twice as fast, doing more just to be seen by the attendings. Ellis, no matter the cause, was always up for a challenge. She had fought, and won, and she expected Meredith to pick up her mantle and push on. For all Meredith wanted to be great, however, she had never fought in her life. She could be flawless, textbook, but she had never felt that passion, had never veered off course.

That first day back at work, right after Derek tried to help her forget and her mother made her life impossibly more fraught, she thought to seek solace in food. Yet when she stepped into the cafeteria the room quieted, people ducking their heads in feigned indifference or arching their necks for a better view. She had the sudden realization of how a patient felt on the operating table, the gallery full, their organs bare, the moist red flesh growing ever drier under the hot harsh lights of the theater. The amnesia of sedation would have been a blessing as she scurried back past the sandwich cart, mentally counting the change in her locker for a vending machine meal.

If she closed her eyes, she could see the one time she had been brave. She saw his face as she told him he was just a guy in a bar, the moment the wall came down between them and she had, for one night, been someone else. The girl in the bar is who she needed to be. She had been drunk and bold and she couldn't see how she could possibly be that person within the eggshell walls of the hospital.

She felt that other Meredith right under her skin every time Derek looked at her, which had been far too much lately. He was everywhere, all the time. It seemed that before all of this, before Alex and April and the bar, she had seen Derek occasionally when trying to catch an elevator or passing each other on rounds. Now he was greeting her when she was waiting for charts at the nurses' station, nodding as she ran down the hall to answer a page, chuckling when he caught her scolding an intern's shoddy central line. He was everywhere, like how a boyfriend's exact make and model of car seemed to multiply overnight after a breakup. Derek was a white Camry in the rear view mirror, always threatening just enough distraction for an accident.

Ellis had certainly complicated things, but Derek had the power to make everything different. It terrified her.

The door creaked open, and the words she prepared to bark at an intruding nurse died in her throat when she saw Alex come around the door. He seemed to be almost as many places as Derek lately.

"I need to talk to you," Alex said.

"No," she said, looking down at her pager hanging from her hip. Anything not to look at him.

"Mere—"

"No." She gripped the charts to her chest, her knuckles blanching.

"We have to talk. Is this where you've been hiding?" He stood in front of the door, arms crossed, as if he planned on blocking her in the room. Her one safe place, alone with Mr. Smith, was suddenly as hostile as every other room at Seattle Grace.

"Why were you looking for me?" she asked. "Haven't you done enough already?"

"Look," he said, "I'm sorry, alright? I was an idiot. I've never had anyone as good to me as you."

"Alex, I know what you're going to say. I know you." Her heart beat hard and she pressed the charts to her chest, as if she was in danger of him seeing the twitching muscle.

"You do know me, Mere. You know that I haven't had a single thing go right for me. It messes with my head. I don't know what to do with good things. I didn't know what to do with you." He ran a hand over his short hair, something he did when he struggled with words. He flexed his fingers where they rested on the back of his neck, closed his eyes for a moment, and came toward her. "I know now, Mere. I've changed. I can make up to you, I swear."

"Alex," she said softly.

He looked at her, his eyes tired.

"Alex," she said again. "I don't have time for this."

Outside the room, her hand trembling on the closed door, she could hear Mr. Smith groan. There wasn't time to be sentimental, she could hear Alex talking to the old man but it would only be a minute before he skimmed the chart and realized that it was dementia, not pain, that was causing the commotion. She needed to be far away when he came back out of that door.

He wasn't giving up, which didn't surprise her. Defeat wasn't in his nature, just like all the other doctors in the building. He would try to win her back, if only because having her would be easier than trying to figure out what to do with himself without her. It had been four years of their lives now, and outside of the hospital they barely had enough time for each other, much less any kind of real social life.

No one was meant to live in such tight confines. She jogged down the hall, the charts flung at a nurse, her pager in hand as if she had just glanced down at an urgent message. Her work and her life were so tangled from the moment she walked in Seattle Grace as an intern that it was only a matter of time before it tried to strangle her. She spotted Cristina going into a patient's room, her eyes on a chart. Was that what happened when Dr. Burke left? Had it all come crashing down around Cristina like everything she loved was cradled inside a house of cards?

Alex knew about her pancreatic patients, at any rate he would search the surgical floor first, then the OR galleries, then the on call rooms. She knew of a place he wouldn't look, though, a place he wouldn't dare go.

She glanced at the elevator doors as she walked past them to the stairs. _Oh no_, she thought, _not today_.

Ellis' office was at the end of the cat walk, glass walls looking out over the surgical floor, a hawk's nest where she could surveil the minutiae of the staff's comings and goings. That was why Meredith considered her father far luckier with his less prestigious position, that he was able to tuck away in a windowless room around the corner.

Richard hadn't changed offices in twenty years. Meredith could find her way to his door in her sleep, could picture perfectly the little plastic plaque with his name and title. Down the hall, third door on her right, just as it had been since she was no taller than the handle on that very door.

Meredith turned the knob with a sigh. Maybe he would be there, but likely he wouldn't. No doctor she had any respect for spent more time than necessary in their office. She imagined laying on the loveseat across from his desk, surrounded in the vague hint of his cologne that had permeated every surface for two decades, flipping through a surgical journal, her legs tucked under her. It would be a nice way to kill twenty minutes before she had to check on her patients or prevent an intern from maiming someone. It was all she had, really, that could take the edge off this day.

Before she had opened the door completely she spotted her mother sitting at the desk, bowed over what she assumed was paperwork. Before she could close the door again Ellis looked up and over to her. Meredith froze, and it was only at her mother's insistence that she closed the door behind her and sat on the couch she had been foolishly daydreaming of.

"I couldn't get anything done out there," Ellis said, her head down, waving her hand at the hospital outside the door. "The moment I settle in someone has to come plead with me for something."

"The downside of being the boss, I guess." Meredith laced her fingers together on her lap, willing herself not to dig her nails into her skin.

"Departments always need more money, or new equipment, or more nurses." Ellis looked up, her scrawling pen slowing. "You'll see one day. There aren't enough hours to do everything you feel needs done."

"Yeah," Meredith said, drawing the word out, searching for something better to say. "Yeah, someday," she finished feebly.

"What did you need?" Ellis asked, her eyes back on the papers in front of her, scratching initials and signatures here and there as she read.

Meredith could not tell her that she was hiding. It didn't matter that her ex-fiance was out there, looking for her, or that she didn't have a friend to go to except the cute guy from the bar that she couldn't seem to avoid. She knew what Ellis expected of her, and this was not it.

"The Humpty Dumpty, from Boston," she started, trying to come up with an argument why she shouldn't be primary surgeon on the case.

"You're prepared, right?" Ellis said as she flipped the sheet in front of her. When Meredith didn't answer she continued, "You've seen one done?"

"Yes," Meredith answered.

"Then you're ready to do one. Next case you'll be able to teach it to one of your residents." Ellis smiled down at her work. "You'll be an attending by then, it will be the perfect time to show off your skills as an instructor."

"Of course," Meredith said. "Isn't it a little unfair that the other residents don't have a chance to do one as well?"

"You have to take advantage of opportunities like this, Meredith," Ellis said. "Let the others worry about themselves, I assure you they are doing a fine job of it."

Ellis tapped the end of her pen on the wood desktop, her eyes never leaving the page she was reading. Meredith sat, knowing she was not done receiving the wisdom of her mother, the great Ellis Grey, the kick ass surgeon that any resident would kill to learn from. She sat and tried her best to appreciate that.

"You're not still thinking of Karev," Ellis said. "He humiliated you. He is not worth a moment of your time." She looked up then, staring hard at her daughter. "Do you hear what I am saying? He is not worthy of you, nor of this family. If I thought he was worth the trouble of an ethics investigation I would have fired him three days ago."

"You don't need to do that," Meredith said. "And I wasn't thinking about him. Cristina is a good surgeon—"

"Yang can take care of herself," Ellis said. "You need to worry about your career, not hers."

"I wasn't—" Meredith started.

"These other residents, they aren't your friends," Ellis told her. "They are competition, they are between you and your full potential. When you pass your boards and start applying for positions, you need to be clear that you are the best thing coming out of Seattle." Ellis sat, flipping through her papers, for a full minute in silence. "Meredith?" she asked after she wasn't acknowledged.

"Yes, Mother. I understand," Meredith said.

"Good."

They sat for ten minutes, Meredith watching the clock, willing herself to stay put if only to have that much more time without the threat of Alex hovering over her, tapping her foot in time with the twitching seconds. She was out of her seat and moving as soon as her self-imposed confinement was up. Ellis looked up as Meredith walked toward the door. Ellis nodded, Meredith nodded back.

Meredith broke into a jog as soon as she got the page to OR Three. Starting from the catwalk and taking the stairs put her at a distinct disadvantage, however, and by the time she got there the patient had coded three times and she told the junior resident to call time of death. She resolved to get over her discomfort with elevators as she walked back out into the hall, tossing her mask in the garbage. Surgeons didn't have the luxury of changing things like that.

She was debating whether she could have changed the outcome, if her patient could have lived, when something on the OR board caught her attention. Her Humpty Dumpty, listed halfway up just as it had been in the morning when she had checked, now had A. Karev listed underneath her name as "assisting." Meredith could think of far more appropriate verbs for what he intended to do while she scraped the tumor out of a man's heart. Badgering, perhaps, or accosting. There was nothing Alex could offer her that would assist her in anything.

It was too much. There was no way she could concentrate with Alex in the room trying to rehash their relationship. The fact that he dared to do it meant he wasn't going to be worth a damn in there either. This patient who had come across the country so he could live to see his children grow up, who out his trust in her, in her mother, in this hospital, he deserved the best. Meredith wasn't the best, not today. Not now.

Cristina was in the hall outside her patient's room, barking orders at an intern, when Meredith skidded to a stop next to her. It took a moment for Meredith to catch her breath, her hands on her knees, while Cristina ordered a new round of labs on one of her pancreatic patients. When the intern turned and ran, forms in hand, Cristina looked down at Meredith with a smirk.

"What do you want?" she asked. "Are you trying to kill a patient too?"

"Maybe," Meredith said, panting.

"Nice," Cristina said as she walked off.

Meredith called after her, but she didn't slow. Straightening, holding her side as if that would help the stabbing pain, she followed.

"Have you assisted on a Humpty Dumpty before?" she asked Cristina's retreating back.

"Third year," Cristina said, "probably before you even knew what one was."

"Now is the perfect time to do one," Meredith said.

Cristina turned at that. "Oh no," she said, "I'm not sharing this with you. I'm not watching you piddle around in there, ruining the magic."

"You don't have to. Take it." Meredith flagged down a passing nurse and asked for the case's chart.

"What?" Cristina asked, frowning.

Generosity wasn't something they did with surgeries, not in the five years Meredith had been working here. She took a moment to savor the sight of Cristina desperately trying to figure out what self-serving motive Meredith could possibly have here, what mystery case had come in under her nose that was more exciting than the dream surgery she was being offered.

"Go put your name on the board," Meredith told her. "When you see who else will be in there you'll understand."

"You can't seriously be giving it up because of him," Cristina said.

"Not entirely," Meredith said. The nurse had returned, offering her the chart.

"What is it then?" Cristina asked, grabbing the binder.

"It should be yours." Meredith smiled, the first real smile in three days. "You and I both know that."

As Meredith walked away she heard Cristina mumble an uncertain thanks, but she knew without a doubt that as soon as she walked out of sight Cristina would be doing her very best victory lap for the whole floor to see. She hoped that Cristina would be good enough to rub it in the other residents' faces, just a little.

Who was she kidding? April would be sick with envy for a week.

She had to ask three different nurses if they knew where she could find Dr. Shepherd. She could tell they had to resist the impulse to ask which one. Even once they reminded themselves that there was only one Shepherd now, there was still a moment of disbelief that a resident was asking for him. Meredith felt a tiny stab of sadness. Derek really wasn't a very popular guy.

She found him leaving radiology, a smile on his face as he said goodbye to the tech still reading the scans on the monitor. He smiled wider when he saw her.

"I need your help," she said.

He took her arm and led her across the hall into a nearby exam room, flipping the pink flag out to show the room was occupied, and closed the door behind him.

"I thought we were doing the friend thing," he said. "But I'm willing to compromise if you are."

"I need in on a surgery," she said.

He was looking down at her, his thoughts clearly unprofessional, and Meredith wasn't sure he heard her at all.

"Surgery," she said pointedly. "This afternoon. Do you have one?" She poked him in the chest, just the tip of a finger for an instant, but she drew it back forcefully as if he was a hot stove.

"I still have to schedule it, but I just saw scans of a beautiful tumor." He reached for her hand, which hung in the air between them, her finger still pointed. "If you do some research for me, I might let you place a clamp or two."

His hand, warm and firm around hers, was enough to make her mind fuzzy. She had enough on her plate today, she reminded herself. There was no room for Derek in it, only Dr. Shepherd.

She pulled back and walked toward the door. "Page me when you book the OR," she said.

He said her name and she stopped. For all the times he had said it she was beginning to think that he liked it.

"Why do you need a surgery?" he asked.

"After," she said. "I'll tell you all about it after we're done."


	5. Chapter 5

Derek's office door looked like every other in the hospital. His name was imprinted in a severe font on a rectangular piece of gray plastic, neatly affixed at eye level. It was plain, unassuming. Its silver handle jutted out toward her, mocking her.

_A door_, Meredith thought. _I'm over-thinking a damn door._

With her free hand she smoothed the front of her gray scrub top, plucked at the long sleeve of her lavender undershirt, patted her already neat ponytail. In her other hand she held two pages of notes and three published papers on the type of glioma that she desperately needed to scrub in on in a few hours. She had done her research for Derek, per the instructions she found in her email. He probably would have said what he wanted when he told her about the case down in the exam room, but she had fled the scene as soon as she had what she wanted. Derek might have even looked for her, but she was getting very good at not being found.

_Dr. Shepherd_, she reminded herself, _not Derek. _

Once inside his office she looked around. It was like the office of every other attending, cool colors and cherry wood, clean lines and fluorescent lighting. Derek's appeared more lived in than most, a man grown accustomed to living with very little space. His desk was neatly organized, if packed with paperwork, and his dry cleaning lay across the little couch by the door. He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head, shirtsleeves rolled back messily. Little yellow pieces of paper fluttered around his head, the wall behind his desk covered in sticky notes that fluttered as she closed the door behind her.

Derek smiled as she handed him her notes. He motioned for her to come around the desk. Once she was standing behind him he waved a hand toward the monitor.

"That's your tumor?" she asked. The mass glowed pale gray in the darker matter of the brain, spread like supple orchid petals into the tender meat of memories, of movement, of a thousand moments learned.

"Our glioma," he said. "With vessels here and here," he said, pointing to the branching black calligraphy on the screen, "wrapped around an artery, and having spread bilaterally—"

"It's smart," Meredith said.

"Beautiful," he said, looking at the screen.

The way he was looking at the scan was the way a different man would look at his child after her first dance recital. They tried as surgeons to eradicate disease, to ease pain and suffering, but they also saw works of art, beautiful biology. He battled so many tumors, slicing them from their homes, killing them to save people. He also came to appreciate the tumor's fight for life, the way they flourished, trying to make themselves inextricably linked to their dying hosts. He admired them as someone who had battled them and had both won and lost everything. The look in his eyes was something that she could identify intellectually but had never experienced, not like he had.

"Do you see that vessel right there?" Derek asked, his finger hovering in front of the pixels. "That's the key. If we can clamp that, we can get it all. I know it."

"You really think so?" Meredith asked.

"We can save this man," he said, turning to her.

She would be wrong if she said she wasn't aware of their proximity. Even sitting his mouth was not far from her own. He looked up at her, his gaze hesitating on her lips, then stared deep into her eyes.

If anyone walked in the door they wouldn't understand. They would think he was just some lecherous boss, abusing his position and his pitiable status as the hospital cuckold to get a piece of ass in his downtime. Such things weren't uncommon; it usually held that the most likely explanation was the correct one. No one in this hospital knew Dr. Shepherd very well, very few saw the goodness in him with his determination to answer small talk with grunts and pessimism. No one would believe that poor, heartbroken Meredith Webber hadn't been duped.

She knew he wouldn't move from that spot, wouldn't put her in the position of having to refuse him. He would look at her and hope she wanted him, which was why she had to lower herself and put her mouth on his this time.

It was the same as the other times, but more so. His smell the same intoxication, but now also holding recognition. His hair in her fingers was just as soft, slightly tacky with whatever products he used to make it so damned perfect, but the feeling of it parting beneath her fingers tingled through her palms. His arms, wrapped around her, drew her body to him just as tight, but she felt the heat of him on her like a fever. His mouth, the stubble on his jaw, his fingers working up into her ponytail, it was all so much, it was all she could hold in her mind except that she needed more.

This was how it was with him, a selfish greed, a sudden instinct to take and take as if there may never be more. When she felt his breath on her skin she wanted to hoard him up, save this feeling for worse days, as if the other shoe would inevitably drop and she would need every moment of pleasure she had ever experienced just to get through. She needed him, needed this, no matter what might come of it.

He slipped his thumbs into the cups of her bra and she gasped into his mouth. She was leaning away from him and he followed her with his mouth until she pulled the hem of her undershirt up and between them, her scrub top caught in her frenzy, and tossed both shirts to the floor behind her. His laugh was slow and low in her ear as he lowered his head and nibbled her neck, his fingers now working her hair free, tugging at the elastic that held it. She put her hands on either side of his face, drug him upright, and she felt the corners of his mouth turn up as she kissed him again and again.

His hands worked over the soft flesh of her breasts. She felt herself heat under the friction of his skin, felt the flush make its way up to her neck. The muscles in her pelvis sang the bass notes of a pleasant ache. He took her lower lip between his teeth and nibbled gently, then gave it a firm bite. It was so easy to let him have his way, ridiculously easy to let him take his time and explore, find each tender spot, each bundle of neurons. It was his specialty, and she knew he had spent hundreds of hours memorizing the name and path of each nerve, what its function was, what signals it sent to the muscles or skin or to the brain. She knew that it was his job to know, but she was certain that what his hands were doing didn't come from a textbook, although that might have helped him along.

His fingers slipped around to her back, unhooking the tiny clasps along her spine easily. Then her bra was on the floor somewhere in the vicinity of her shirt, and he had his arms around her, standing, lifting her, depositing her right in the middle of his desk calendar in what had been the one patch of free space on the entire desk.

She laughed quietly. "Not much room to work here, is there?" she said, picking up a binder that had been digging into her hip.

He nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching up, and bent to kiss her. As he put his hands beside her hips he swept them outward, papers and office supplies and what she was sure was his keyboard flying off the desk. As they clattered to the floor she laughed and tossed the binder to the side.

"I didn't lock the door," she said.

He walked around the desk. "Let's fix that too, then."

She watched as he turned the lock, the deadbolt clicking into place. She watched him, the confident lines of his shoulders, the way he leaned his head. She memorized the way his body moved under his clothes and imagined what he would look like in the soft light instead of the darkness of his trailer in the forest. She had wanted this, wanted to lose herself in him, since she stepped out of that trailer days ago. Being alone with him, knowing that soon he would again run his fingers over her skin, felt better than anything else she had done since that night. Just the anticipation felt better than surgery, than frustrating her mother, than her father's consolation, than mean jokes with Cristina. It was him, the anesthetic that he became whenever she let him in. When she let him be Derek, the guy in the bar, the rest of her life seemed needlessly complicated. The connection between them, she thought as she watched him walk back to her, positioning himself between her knees, was overwhelming.

If he was someone else, if she was someone with a different life and a mended heart, she could imagine getting lost in him, in the feeling of their bodies together. They would take long weekends together, holed up in a hotel room far away, their phones locked in the glove box of his car, and lose themselves for days. Instead she was sitting on his desk, their pagers mercifully silent, and he was her boss and they were still hiding together in stolen minutes. Then he took off his shirt and she didn't think of alternate universes anymore.

It wasn't until she felt his chest brush against hers that she noticed she was cold. Her cool skin just emphasized the heat of his mouth as it trailed along her collarbone and dipped into the path between her breasts. She arched her back, begging the warmth of his mouth to spread, wander, find new places to wake into tingling arousal. He tugged at the waist of her pants, then pulled at the ends of the drawstring, the crisp gray cotton slumping onto the desk. She lifted herself and he pulled them down, then pulled each of her sneakers off, letting her clothes slip to the floor. Kneeling between her knees, his breath warming her thighs, he looked up at her for a long moment, his perfect hair messy from her fingers, his lips red from her kisses. He stayed on his knees and reached for the thin elastic waist of her panties and drew them off too, tossing them away.

His eyes, dark blue and utterly honest, were too much to look at. She sat, exposed and unembarrassed, and drew him up to her again, her hand on his scratchy jaw. He kissed her, hard, his hand slipping down her soft, flat stomach and between her thighs, his mouth and his fingers working in inexplicable union, drawing taut a cord of desire from her mouth to her core. She moaned her pleasure into his mouth as she hooked her ankles around his waist and drew him closer. The warmth of him, inches from her goose-bumped skin, was excruciatingly far away.

Meredith groaned as he retreated, but grew silent as she watched him unbutton his pants and lay them across his chair, which had somehow come to rest on its side beside him. The way he carefully smoothed them, taking his time, a small smirk visible as she caught his face in profile, was more than she could take. She was on her feet in a moment, her fingertips snatching at his dark red boxers. She plucked at the fabric and he batted her hands away, then danced a little jig to the side. She followed, her hands in front of her, fingers menacingly wiggling inches from him. She grinned up at him as she darted forward, taking the soft cotton shorts into her fists and pulling them triumphantly free. He laughed at her, stepped out of his underthings, and pulled her close.

She shivered as the length of his warm body pressed into her. He ran his fingers through her hair, brushing it behind her, his chin resting lightly against her cheek. She felt along his sides, felt the crinkly hairs at the edge of his chest, the narrowing of his waist, the firmness of his hips. She traced circles on the tops of his thighs as he growled into her hair. He pushed her back until her legs hit the desk, then lifted her onto it again so swiftly she gasped with surprise. She was still sucking in air when his mouth covered hers again, his tongue hot and insistent, his body between her legs. He was filling her, her body more than ready, more than needing, more than enthusiastic.

Her mind was everywhere at once, taking in the burning, building sensations, listening to the low, guttural noises he made, feeling his hands where they pressed into her back. She pressed closer, lost the ability to put thoughts into words. He was heat and friction and motions, his fingers tangled in the ends of her hair, gently tugging at her scalp. He was everywhere, the feel of his skin exposing her every nerve. She needed him, needed him to keep moving, to keep building the ball of hot energy inside her, that ball that kept expanding out from between her thighs, down her legs and up into her belly, swirls and eddies of lust that made her toes curl.

He tightened his fist in her hair and she dropped her head back, their lips parting. Her mouth was open, her neck arched, when the energy inside her combusted, exploded, sending warmth spreading, her fingers tingling and her legs clenching around him. It took every bit of will inside her not to cry out, to let the walls echo with the sensations that flowed through her, as she listened to him groan from behind his closed lips.

He lowered her to lay back on the wood desktop, cool against her hot skin, and he rested his head on her chest as her panting slowed. She watched his head of messy hair rise and fall with her breaths. She felt tired and alive, painfully alive, all at once. She felt the pulse of every cell, the constant motion of metabolism. He was heavy, she came to realize, but comfortable. He had found a spot for his head between her breasts where he seemed to fit perfectly. She thought of the long weekend she had pictured, their alternate selves, and in her drowsy state she felt herself want it, with them just as they were.

She knew they couldn't stay there, that they would become uncomfortable, but when he rose she was disappointed anyway. They handed clothes back and forth as they found them, reassembling their outfits, dressing in silence. She caught him looking at her. Some of those times she thought that he was actually catching her, watching her, that perhaps he was afraid that she would slip out the door again, her practiced vanishing act.

"Meredith," he said as she pulled her undershirt over her head, "what does this mean?"

She held her scrub top in her hands. "I don't know," she said, looking down at it. "You're my boss."

"I'm your boss' boss," he said with a smirk.

"My mother is your boss," she said.

He picked up his tipped chair and sat to put on his shoes. "How many people can you think of that this would be less complicated with?" he asked.

"Not many," she said, smoothing her scrub top. It had become horrendously wrinkled, but still she tried to help it. "Not in this hospital."

"What do you want this to be?" he asked. He stepped toward her as she fiddled with the cuffs of her long sleeves. His hands were warm as he took hers. "We can be whatever you want."

"You know it isn't that easy," she said, pulling her hands away, digging in her pocket for her spare hair elastic. "You're still married."

"Yes."

"My engagement began and ended less than a week ago."

"Right."

"We covered that you're my boss."

He laughed. "Not that again."

"My mother would kill you," she said, pulling her hair back into a sloppy ponytail.

"I'm fully aware of your mother's powers," he said, "lethal and otherwise."

"I don't need this sort of thing right now," she said. "I'm barely hanging on as it is. Then there's boards, and resumes—"

"I get it," he said.

"You get it," she echoed.

"Life is too much right now," he said.

"Right."

"So," he said, "we play it by ear?" The hopeful look in his eyes made him look like just a guy in a bar again, a guy up for anything.

She laughed. "The research you asked for is here," she said, waving her hand at the debris field on his floor, "somewhere."

Right at that moment her pager buzzed in its holster. The little screen said it was a 911 for one of her pancreatic patients.

"Go," he said as she scowled at it. "Surgery is at four."

She nodded, patting her pockets to make sure she had everything. She glanced at him one last time as she opened the door. He stood, slightly more wrinkled than before but otherwise unscathed, in the middle of a pile of sticky notes. As she looked at him one fluttered to the floor from the wall behind him. The keyboard to his computer hung from its cable off the corner of the desk, swaying slightly still.

"My office door is always open!" he said, smiling.

Out in the hall Meredith had to cover her mouth to keep herself from grinning stupidly as she ran to her patient's room.


	6. Chapter 6

_I normally don't do author notes, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has read this story so far and an extra thank you to everyone who has written reviews. I appreciate feedback so much, not only is it motivating but it lets me know what I'm doing right so I can do more of it. This chapter and the next are entirely due to reviews and the push they gave me to keep going on this story. Life has been kicking my ass lately, but you guys deserve to see where this goes and I am determined to get you there. I can't guarantee that there won't be some waiting involved, but I hope you will all stick with me and this little AU. I promise it will be an interesting ride._

_Again, reviews are very much appreciated. I also accept PMs if that's more your speed. Either way, thank you._

* * *

Meredith Webber had three pancreatic patients assigned to her for post-operative observation. One of those patients had developed serious complications and would need surgery by morning if the information from one of her interns was even remotely correct. This should have frustrated her what with the threat of losing a coveted surgery to another resident and with it bragging rights, but Meredith was dreaming of tumors instead. She walked, just a bit slower than the frenzied pace of surgical residents, and thought of brains. Her mind relentlessly circled on the idea of the slick pink tissue, of the cool, twilight quiet of neurosurgery.

It was something she hadn't thought of before, of just how different it was to operate on a brain. The lighting, the tools, even the motions of the surgeon's hands were different. She had spent hours looking into a giant microscope, taken with the understated grace, her face pressed to the crinkly sterile plastic covering the eyepiece. She had grown used to being up to her wrists in blood, cutting muscle tough from perpetual contractions, her fingers straining against the scalpel. The delicate dance Derek's hands had performed had been hypnotizing. She walked blindly, dreaming of all the diseased brains and spines she could poach in the pit tomorrow so she could get in the OR to watch those hands.

She didn't see Cristina walking toward her, so when the other woman grabbed her arm and spun her abruptly she let out a little squeal.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "My shift is over."

Cristina remained silent, leading her down the hall and through the doors to the stairwell.

"What are you dragging me for?" Meredith asked.

Cristina stopped, stairs climbing away to her right and another flight dropping away behind Meredith's heels. Meredith began to tap her foot. "I have been in the OR all day," she said, "and I have to pee."

"It's," Cristina began, then laced her fingers together just under her frayed ponytail, her arms like great wings on either side of her head, and began to pace. "It's—" she said again, meeting Meredith's eyes, then turned away and fell silent.

"What?" Meredith asked. "If it's my mother, I know how to deal with her."

"Do you remember the Jane Doe last week?" Cristina asked, her back still turned. "The one who needed a pace maker, had some sort of thing for vintage television or whatever."

"We cracked her chest," Meredith said. "Does she need another surgery? I could assist if you need me to."

"Since when have I ever needed you to assist?" Cristina asked, turning toward her, her eyebrows raised, disappearing under her bangs. "Seriously."

"Are we reminiscing about the good times, then? Because while I really enjoyed bonding with you while wrist-deep in her organs, I really do need to pee." Meredith started for the door but found Cristina in the way, arms out and eyes wide.

"Her name is Alexandra Grey," Cristina said. When Meredith didn't respond she elaborated, "She's your sister."

"I don't have a sister," Meredith said. It was absurd. There was no way a person lost track of a sibling, especially when they were otherwise an only child.

"Your father remarried," she said. "He talked about you sometimes when she was growing up."

"My father," Meredith said, "is married to my mother." She scowled at Cristina. She had thought they were friends, and now Cristina was feeding her some line about crackheads being her long-lost family. "My father gave me a ride to work this morning. I think I would know if he had another daughter."

"Her name is Grey" Cristina said impatiently. "As in Thatcher Grey. The guy who helped make you?"

Meredith had the sudden, horrible realization in that moment that she had never, not once, uttered her birth father's name to anyone in that building since she was young enough to observe nap time. When Richard had adopted her and given her his name Thatcher had faded from her memory, replaced instead by learning to ride a bike and career day at school impressing her friends with her rock star surgeon father. If she hadn't thought of Thatcher since she began working in the hospital then she couldn't imagine how Cristina would be able to get the information for such an elaborate prank. That meant the Jane Doe might actually be related to her. It made her a little sick to think about it.

"Why are you telling me this?" Meredith asked.

"Because Avery is too much of a chicken to come to you himself," Cristina said, smirking. "There's a little problem, but she can tell you about that." Cristina grabbed her arm again. "Come on."

Meredith would have objected to being towed around the hospital, but she was having a hard time getting her legs to move and her friend's momentum set her in motion, and the moving was keeping any more horrifying words from coming out of Cristina's mouth. Meredith would take silver linings where she could get them.

Meredith hadn't seen her father since she was five years old, since that last day when her mother had kicked him out and they had begun new lives. What was he doing now? He had met her mother in med school, had married Ellis and gotten her pregnant, then went into research. She hadn't seen his name on any articles she came across, and she had to admit that even her mother wasn't quite good enough to censor the internet. The sad fact hit her as Cristina began to slow, that she hadn't put Thatcher's name into a search engine even once, hadn't imagined him as anything more than a blurry memory of a man with suitcases in his hand walking out her front door. For an instant anger swelled inside her. She had been a child, his child, and she was feeling sorry that she hadn't looked for him when he was the father, the adult, the one who left. He had never called her or sent a birthday card, hadn't checked to see if she needed anything from him. Maybe she got it from Thatcher, this ability to forget a person.

They stopped in front of a door, the little window showing a slice of white wall glowing under florescent lights. Cristina turned to her, looking her up and down. "Hey," she said, "I heard one of your patients will be in surgery any minute." Cristina laughed and shook her head. "Less competition for me," she said.

Unceremoniously Cristina opened the door, shoved Meredith in, and closed it between them.

Meredith had forgotten how small this girl was. Only a few days ago her hands had been pumping her heart, hoping to bring her back to life. Now she noticed the girl's face, her scattered piercings, the smudged eyeliner that looked both old and new, the ropes of dark hair framing her head on the pillow. Meredith tried to place her, looked for her father's features, but she found that she couldn't remember anything about Thatcher very clearly.

"You're—" Meredith said.

"Lexie," the girl croaked, her eyes gliding across the room to rest on Meredith. "Lexie Grey. And you're Meredith."

"You said you're my sister," Meredith said.

"Dad told me your name once," Lexie said, shifting slightly in the bed. The covers were pulled high around her shoulders and she shrugged down into them as if she was afraid a stray draft could come and chill her further.

"How is he?" Meredith asked. "What does he do now?"

"Nothing," Lexie said, her voice rasping low. "He doesn't do anything. He's dead."

"Oh," said Meredith. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah," said Lexie. "It sucked."

"You don't have any family with you," Meredith said.

"Because I don't have any," Lexie said, her hands drawn up now, fingering nervously at the edge of her covers, pinching the top cotton blanket between her fingers.

"Your mother is—"

"Dead," Lexie said. "A few years ago."

Lexie turned toward her, eyes tired and face emotionless. "That friend of yours, Avery, made me tell him. You want proof. I don't have any. I could tell you about him, but who are we kidding? You haven't seen him since before I was born, right?"

"How old are you?" Meredith asked.

"Twenty-seven," Lexie said.

"He got busy pretty quick, then," Meredith said.

"I was a bit of an accident," Lexie said. Her mouth spread into a thin, grim smile. "Let me be an example of why it's always good to wrap it up."

"So this is supposed to be some kind of heartwarming reunion with the sister I didn't know I had?" Meredith asked.

"I heard you had something to do with why I'm still here," Lexie said. "You're a surgeon, you should know they're not just going to let me go home."

"Because you have a pacemaker," Meredith said.

"And because I seem to have a knack for keeling over." Lexie adjusted in her bed, the covers rustling over her. "I was stupid and said something about a sister being a doctor here before all this, before I knew that it would mean anything. That guy is unrelenting, you know that?"

"It's the doctor thing," Meredith said. "We can be hard to live with."

Lexie's hoarse laugh made Meredith wince. She went to the bathroom and filled a flimsy little plastic cup with water. "You were intubated, it can be a little hard on the throat for a few days. Drink," Meredith said, "the water will help."

Lexie held the cup between her hands, her eyes no longer narrow with mocking amusement. "Thanks," she said quietly.

Meredith watched Lexie for a while as she set the cup on the tray table next to the bed and got comfortable, her hands disappearing under the blankets again. She had no way to be sure that Lexie really was her sister, not now, but she could find a way. The real question was what she would do once she knew.

Her pager buzzed on her hip. That would be her mother, who no doubt found out that she hadn't been in surgery with the VIP after all. It surprised her now that Ellis hadn't been outside the scrub room doors the minute she had been finished. Either way Meredith had to face the consequences, and now was as good a time as any. Better, if she thought about it, because she could get a drink at Joe's after, now that her shift was over.

"When do they want to release you?" Meredith asked.

"Two days," Lexie said, "but Avery thought he could buy me some time."

"I'll be back," Meredith said. "I'll figure something out."

"May eleventh," Lexie said just as Meredith reached for the door handle, "last year. That's when Dad died. Look it up."

Meredith searched for her father's obituary on a computer at the nurses station. She spent far too long looking at his picture, seeing her own features, remembering the sandy color of his hair, the way it had curled in her fingers when he was rocking her to sleep. In the obituary there was a mention of one daughter surviving, Alexandra, just as she was certain there would be. It also mentioned Thatcher's wife, Susan, deceased, and another daughter lost in infancy. It was too much tragedy, she thought, for one person. For Lexie to have no family, no one to be there when she got sick, when she had nearly died. Meredith couldn't imagine being so alone, what that sort of isolation would do to someone.

She had seen patients over the last five years that were all alone, who struggled to assemble families out of the people they had on hand, or who struggled to survive without a family of any kind. Meredith had learned to ignore it pretty quickly. She had found that she only had so much of herself to give, could only cry for someone dying all alone so many times before she saw that that energy that she spent feeling bad for them could be put into making real medical differences in people's lives. That was the difference between her and the residents who had washed out of the program. She sat in front of the computer at the nurses station and wondered about what had happened to Lexie, then worried about having wondered at all, until she realized that there was a difference between her sister and any other patient she had cut apart and patched back together. Lexie would be better off with all of her, all that she could do, rather than just the doctor persona that Meredith put on with her white coat each morning.

She was thinking about this while she walked to her mother's office, was still preoccupied when she opened the office door and shut it behind her. It was all she could do to focus when Ellis began to speak.

"Would you care to tell me why you weren't on the Humpty Dumpty that I assigned you?" Ellis said, her eyes trained like lasers on Meredith's eyebrows.

"I had another procedure," Meredith said.

"I am not going to pretend that you thought I assigned you that case out of convenience." Ellis' gaze did not waver. "I wanted you to do that surgery. You disobeyed my orders."

"I gave the surgery to another surgeon who was more than capable. Was there a poor outcome?" Meredith did not shift, did not break eye contact, did not so much as breathe too quickly in case her mother decided that it was a sign of weakness.

"The patient is fine," Ellis said quickly, as if that was beside the point. "This was for your career, Dr. Webber. This outcome would have looked phenomenal on your boards, not to mention the experience that you would take to you fellowship."

"I understand how to handle my career," Meredith said.

"Do you?" Ellis said, her voice raising. "Do you understand? I was under the impression that you were in surgery with Dr. Shepherd all day in a specialty that has nothing to do with your chosen field." Ellis pressed both of her palms into the top of the desk in front of her, the firm muscles of her forearms becoming rigid and defined under her pale skin. "I fail to see, Dr. Webber, how that was at all beneficial to your career."

"Another Neuro case like that may never come through here again," Meredith said.

"You are not a neurosurgeon," Ellis said, the words spaced as if she thought Meredith was having a hard time understanding. "Even so, Derek Shepherd is not a mentor, not for you, not for anyone."

Meredith rallied the sum total of her strength to not respond. She was, with her entire consciousness, off the record as far as the worthiness of Derek.

"You need to reconsider what you're doing here, Meredith," Ellis said. "You have been working toward a fellowship for five years, and now is not the time to develop a rebellious streak, or whatever this is you're doing." Ellis began to move the papers around on her desk, picking up the motions of business. "I have been helping you, giving you cases to give you a good foundation for your future, but I think you can handle it on your own now. It's high time you learn to fend for yourself out there," Ellis said, tapping papers into a neat stack in her hands.

So that was it, Meredith was cast out of the nest, left to prove her worth to her all-seeing mother. It was a joke, really, because no matter her mother's opinion there wasn't a person working in that hospital who would cross Meredith Webber for fear of angering Ellis. Even staff, newly hired, would act catty and brash like anyone else on day one, but by the end of the week they would fall in line. That was why Meredith was still a little shocked that Derek had given her two thoughts, had taken her home, hadn't apologized after that night and instead brushed her hand with his when they stood a little too close in the scrub room. They were alone out there, flouting Ellis Grey's laws, if not to her face then gleefully in private, and nothing good had ever come of that.

"I'm also reassigning your pancreatic patients, since you're so set on charity toward the other residents. I'll make sure they know who they can thank," Ellis said.

Meredith was tired, so tired. Tired of the politics, tired of the people stepping out of her way like she was royalty, tired of cowering before her mother. Maybe it was that tiredness, the thoughts of her family, that made her remember the aching loneliness she felt after her father left. She hadn't asked about him once, but it hadn't been because she didn't love him. Ellis had made it very clear, even to a little girl, that she never wanted to hear about Thatcher Grey ever again. By the time Meredith had taken the name Webber so that the daily reminder that she was Thatcher's daughter was gone she learned to think of her lost father only when she was alone. Eventually she didn't think of him at all anymore and her reward was a life that was easier to live.

"Did you know that Thatcher died?" Meredith asked suddenly, and she felt as if she had been holding her breath since she had walked into the room and only let it out to say that sentence. "Thatcher," she said, "my father."

Ellis stilled. "I know who he is," she said. She began to move, less consciously now, pushing things to one spot and then back. "That's very sad."

"He had another daughter. He remarried." Meredith said.

"Of course," Ellis said, pushing pens around in the cup on her desk with her finger.

"Didn't you think I would want to know about them? That I would want to know my only sister?" Meredith crossed her arms over her chest, watching as Ellis kept her eyes down, feigning disinterest.

"How would I have known he had a child? I haven't heard from him in twenty years," Ellis looked her coolly in the eye, "and neither have you."

"You made sure of that, didn't you?" Meredith said as blood rushed to her cheeks.

"And I thought you were satisfied with the family you had," Ellis said, plucking a pen from the cup and gripping it tight.

"It's not a competition," Meredith said.

"You know very well that I did not want to have Thatcher in my life," Ellis said.

"But maybe I did!" Meredith said, her hands balled at her sides. "Maybe your needs don't always have to come first for everyone else. Did you ever consider that?"

"Meredith Webber," Ellis said, her voice low, "I do everything in my power to make sure you and your father are happy. You know that. How dare you insinuate that I do this for myself."

"I'm not insinuating," Meredith said. "You made me go into Cardio. You make Dad clean up your messes. You make everyone around you do what makes you happy and you don't think for a second about what might make them happy."

"Get out." Ellis stood and pointed at the door, her eyes on Meredith's. "Go and think about what you're doing. Come back when you have something to say for yourself."

Meredith walked out the office and across the catwalk. She had her phone out of her pocket and a call placed as the final steel door crashed closed behind her, sealed tight between her and Seattle Grace Hospital. Mist settled on her hot face and she blew out a long, steady breath, her hand tight around the phone pressed to her ear.

"Cristina," she said, "I need a favor."


	7. Chapter 7

The sunlight slanted, butter yellow, over the tall buildings to create golden pools on the sidewalk. People walked past in purple shadow only to be lit for a moment in warm, hopeful bursts. Spring was arriving in that instant, and Meredith felt lucky that she could witness it with the warm breeze on her face. She thought back over the last five years and wondered when she had last enjoyed the feel of the new spring sun. Her usual haunts in the building, the places she spent quiet moments with files and paperwork and journals, were all windowless. They gave no clue whether it was midnight or noon, whether it was raining again that day or windy or sunny. She had spent her entire adult life walled in, ignoring the world around her, and she took a deep breath to mark the moment she decided that she wasn't going to do that anymore.

It took Meredith two days to find an apartment, walking around with a real estate agent until she thought the woman might resign in protest. She was very specific about her budget, an amount carefully calculated from the numbers on her bank statements. She was also particular about the necessity of living near the hospital. She settled for a small, slightly shabby fourth floor apartment two blocks away from the emergency department's doors. She had taken a liking to the tall windows that lined two walls of the main room, a living space with kitchen attached. Meredith did not like the feeling that she had no idea what she was doing as she walked through apartments with the increasingly-less-friendly woman who was desperate for her commission. She had no furniture, and if she had she wouldn't have known whether it would all fit in the tiny space. Between the windows and the price, though, she made her decision. There were two bedrooms, so it would have to do. No one would need to sleep on the couch she didn't yet own.

Meredith had considered asking Cristina Yang if she needed a roommate. When she had arrived that first night, not wanting to go home and face the foreboding silent rage of her mother and the consolation of her father, she knew it would never work. Meredith had to dig the couch out from a pile of unopened mail, then clear a space on the floor for her things. The apartment was not so much dirty as cluttered, and it smelled stale more than anything, but she shivered when she noticed the brocade curtains, the plush wool carpet peeking through the old takeout boxes, and the carved wood arm of the couch she would be sleeping on. The rug alone worth more than what she made in a month, but it lay stained and forgotten under years of neglect. Someone had decorated the place, someone had cared, but that person wasn't Cristina. It came down to the fact that Meredith had one real friend, and she wasn't about to risk losing her again over spring cleaning.

It took two days to find her new apartment and one evening for her to box up her belongings and stuff it all into the back of her sedan. As she stood in the middle of her old room, academic trophies on the shelves, certificates crowding the walls, pictures of her school friends tucked into the mirror frame above her dresser, she suddenly wanted to leave as much behind as she could. She didn't want the dust of all those years settling on the window sills of her new home.

She had spent the morning going over the numbers, the lines of her budget nearly memorized by now. She was lucky that for so many years her parents had provided for her without a second thought. Her paychecks, meager as they were, had hardly been touched by cafeteria meals. She filled the passenger seat of her car with department store bags. She looked from where she was sitting to where it was parked, the poor thing sagging a little lower to the ground than usual, burdened with all her earthly belongings. Sheets, towels, curtains, all different than what she was used to, nothing the same color gray as her scrubs or the sophisticated neutrals her parents had paid someone to decorate their house in. Their house, Meredith thought, not mine.

"Meredith?" Derek said from across the table.

She sat straighter, startled, her eyes meeting his. He was sitting with her at the little outdoor cafe table she had picked, his glass of ice water sweating, smiling indulgently. She felt a pang of guilt as she noticed that the navy sweater he was wearing was far to warm. She should have warned him. She rubbed her arms with her palms. The short sleeves of her light blue shirt weren't quite enough now that she sat, finally at rest. A moment ago he had asked her how her day was. It was a more complicated question than he thought.

"Fine," she said. It wouldn't do to repeat her long internal monologue about leases to him.

"I haven't seen you," he said. "Have you been avoiding me?"

"What?" Meredith asked, "I haven't-"

"I would understand, you know," he said. "You said to play it by ear."

"You said that," Meredith corrected.

"Right," he said. "I could help, if you were trying to avoid me. I could send you my schedule, we could draw up boundaries in the hospital."

She wasn't sure what to say until she looked up and saw his smile. "You think we need boundaries?" she asked.

"If that would help you," he said.

"If I drew these lines," she said, "you wouldn't cross them? Not even if I asked?"

"Do you often have moments of weakness?" he asked.

She laughed. "I'm not telling you," she said.

He took a drink from his glass, drops of water pooling between his fingers. "If we're dividing things up then I call the roof," he said.

"The roof? With the helicopters?" she asked.

"I like it up there," he said. "It's quiet, great view, hardly anyone comes up." He wiped his hands on the cloth napkin in front of him. "Except of course for the helicopters."

"What about when I need to meet a trauma?" she asked. "Your roof could really do a number on my career."

"An exception, then," he said. "You need a place too. Where should I stay away from?"

"You want me to tell you?" she asked. "How do I know I won't find you there, looking for cute girls?"

"Have you ever seen me looking for cute girls?" he asked.

"Were you not doing that at Joe's?" she asked.

"I was getting drunk at Joe's," he said. "The cute girl was a bonus."

The waitress came by, took their lunch orders, then hurried back inside the restaurant. They were too late for lunch and far too early for dinner, but when Meredith had called Derek had been stuck in the Skills Lab with a group of interns.

"So these lines," he said, "are they imaginary, or do I need to get you a marker?"

Meredith had the strangest desire to reach over the table and drag him across the table to her. She wanted to forget food entirely. She wished she had thought of that when she had dreamed this afternoon up.

"How long do you have before you're needed?" she asked him.

He raised his eyebrows. "I can make all the time you need."

Meredith rolled her eyes. "That's not it," she said. When he stared at her she said, "I mean, that's not why we're here."

"You're good," he said. "I would have said yes anyway, but you're good."

"I gathered from our previous**-**" she struggled for a phrase that could be said on a Seattle sidewalk on a spring afternoon, "**-**extracurricular activities that you work out."

"You're observant too," he said.

"We're friends, though, right?" she asked.

"I would use different words but yes, Meredith, we're friends." He leaned back in his chair, studying her. "What do you need?"

Meredith thought of how her arms ached after carrying the few boxes from her bedroom to her car, how she had to refuse three different men who had offered to help her with her legion of bags in the mall parking lot. "Do you see that car over there?" she asked. After he turned and nodded she explained. "That's all my crap. I would appreciate it if you would help me get it into my new apartment."

Forty minutes later her stomach was almost painfully full and she was unlocking the door to her new home, Derek behind her, his arms wrapped around a large brown box. On his second trip, as she stacked her folded scrubs on the living room floor, he remarked that she hadn't mentioned just how many flights of stairs were involved when he agreed to this. She, of course, wouldn't have needed his help if it had been on the first floor. They argued, smiling, until he walked out the door again.

She came to some realizations by the time he was finished. She needed furniture, but now she was seeing how impossible it was going to be living even a short while without it. She called the furniture store and persuaded them to come as soon as they were able, using the promise of an obscene tip to her advantage. Derek sat in the middle of her living room floor, the empty boxes stacked along the wall next to him, his damp shirt dripping onto her hardwood floor. She thought of just how much nicer he would look relaxing on a couch. She also needed dishes, as became apparent when he asked about a glass of water and she realized that she didn't have one. He smiled at her and went to the sink, sticking his head under the faucet to catch cold water from the tap in his mouth. Her third thought was that she needed to go to the grocery store for detergent because just after she offered to wash his sweaty shirt she realized she could do no more than give it a rinse then get it good and dry, which would be only marginally better than when she had offered.

When she realized her error she told him, but he obligingly pulled it off anyway and she didn't bother to protest. It was funny how little things mattered when faced with a partially-clothed Derek Shepherd. She was, honest-to-God, entranced with the way his chest was sprinkled with dark hair, how it condensed along the mid-line, how that line stretched down across his firm abdomen and dipped below the waist of his pants. Meredith had seen plenty of male chests before, had in her career seen just about every part of the human body in so many different states so many times that there should have been no wonder left in normal human anatomy. Still she admired, from feet away, the plains and valleys of his damp flesh. The admiration came with the realization that she could have seen this very body anywhere, on a gurney or in the OR or in a dark, quiet office, and it wouldn't have held any wonder for her if that body didn't belong to Derek Shepherd.

She shut herself into her tiny laundry room. She didn't bother turning on the light, instead turning and feeling for the washer, tossing the shirt in and spinning the dial to an unknown setting and pulling the knob. She let the sound of rushing water drown out the panicked drum of her heart. Meredith was in trouble. It was something she should have been thinking about her job or her family, but instead she was most concerned with the trouble of falling for Derek. If it had been someone else, some other attending, it wouldn't have trumped all the other problems in her extraordinarily confused life. The trouble was uniquely him, his nearly dissolved marriage, his position as primary professional frustration of her mother, his hospital nickname of "Bad Shepherd" that was having a hard time dissipating even though there was no other Shepherd to compare to anymore. She pressed her back into the cool door. She was a surgeon, so she knew that it wasn't the problem that mattered, but how she dealt with it.

Derek was lying on the floor when she came back out. "Hey," she said, sitting beside him.

"I don't think I ever want to get up," he said.

"That could be a problem," she said, looking down at him. "You have a job."

"Which is why I have a pager," he said. "If they need me so much, let them call."

Meredith laughed. "Thank you for emptying my car. I wasn't sure I was going to make it after I spent the last twenty-four hours filling it up."

"That's what friends are for," he said. "Why move, though? You should be looking for fellowships by now."

"It's complicated," she said.

"Which is why you have your friend spread out on your floor, listening patiently." He folded his hands under his head and did a very determined-looking impression of contentment.

"Fine," she said, sighing. "I was living with my parents, now I'm not."

"That's very sudden," he said.

"It may have to do with jumping in on your surgery. Not to mention giving away the Humpty Dumpty my mother basically gift wrapped for me." She watched as his eyebrows raised. "So I took the opportunity of a few days off and made a change."

"So the fact that I'm on the floor has nothing to do with your couch waiting for me in a moving van around the corner?" he asked.

"No," she said.

He closed his eyed and groaned dramatically. "And I was looking forward to that."

"I have one," she said. "I mean I'll have one soon, or**-**"

"Hold that thought," he said, getting up.

He poked around the apartment until he found the door to the bathroom and disappeared inside. Meredith listened to the unfamiliar thumps and sighs of the empty space, the sound of him making himself at home, if it could really be considered a home yet.

After a rush of water and far too much silence he poked his head out. "Are you aware of what you have in here?" he asked.

"It's a bathroom," she said.

"With a claw foot tub," he said. "I'm tempted to move in here myself."

She stood and walked into the bathroom with him. "You would give up the trailer for this?" she asked, looking with him at the deep porcelain basin.

"It's tough," he said, "but I can't make a decision based on looks alone."

He turned the tap, his fingers in the stream of water, and steam started to rise from the tub. Meredith had spent every moment since she had walked out of the hospital in a bubble, avoiding anyone who might want to weigh in on her change of heart, her rash decisions. She hadn't seen anyone she'd known since Cristina left late that first night for a trauma. Cristina wasn't someone who asked a lot of questions, but Meredith had left as quickly as she could in the morning in case she came back. She did not want to blurt out all of the nonsensical things that had floated in her head all night, slowly coagulating and forming timelines all the way through the pale dawn. She had walled herself off with the determination that she would do this, and now here was this man laying out towels from her tiny linen closet for them both, and she wanted to know if he thought she was losing her mind, or if instead she might be a little like him.

The water was hot as it closed around her calves, and she lowered herself slowly, knowing that where he sat he would be watching her, anticipating the electric contact between their skin. The thought of his eyes on her shot heat into her belly, her thighs pressing together as she sat between his legs. He began to wet her hair, his hands smoothing it down her back. She closed her eyes as she heard him squeeze her shampoo bottle, the low hollow sound it made, and then his fingers were in her hair, working her scalp, running down to the ends. She tried her best to lose herself in the feeling, to not think of the last few days, of where she was, of everything she still needed to do.

"Derek," she said softly, her eyes still shut.

He hummed a little acknowledgment, his palms cradling the back of her head as he worked his fingers toward her temples.

"I have a sister," she said.

His fingers stilled. She told him all of it, her mother's rage and the banishment from the hospital, the impossibility of finding an apartment, the solitude of life outside work. She told him about Thatcher and his life after her and what her sister was like. She told him what she planned to do and then she grew silent, waiting for a witty comeback, a joke, anything.

"You weren't avoiding me," he said quietly.

"No," she said.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know if I'm about to make a huge mistake."

He pulled his hands from her hair and she turned to look at him. "I think you have to try," he said. "I don't think you would forgive yourself if you didn't after coming this far."

She leaned back against him, her lathered head nestled in the little hollow under his collarbone. "It's what we do, isn't it? We're the kind of people who want to help."

She could feel the low hum he made vibrating in his chest. He ran a hand over her shoulder, warming her. Suds ran in tiny rivers down his chest and into the water, forming little white islands that she pushed around with her fingertips.

"You can't stop thinking about it," he said, the words rumbling through his body and into her own.

"It's all I've done," she said.

"Do you want me to give you a ride to the hospital?" he asked.

"Yes please," she said quietly to the bubble islands.

"On one condition," he said, his wet fingers on her chin, drawing her face around to look at him. "You have to invite me back." His face widened with a conspiratorial smile. "I can provide all sorts of services."

She splashed him, a little wave of water that fluttered against his chest. "Services?" she asked, laughing.

"I could carry up your groceries, make dinner, fix your toilet. I could move your furniture" he said, "once you actually have some." He dodged the next splash that had been aimed at his face.

"Soon," she said. "I'll have furniture soon, and you can be the first to see my decorating failures."

"We should get going, then," he said, nudging her shoulder. "You don't want to be late."

Though the emergency entrance was only two blocks away she couldn't risk her mother seeing her, not yet. It would be impossible to tell if the department was slow and she could slip through unnoticed, or if they would be swamped and she would get flagged down to assist, even in a rumpled sweater and jeans. Instead she let Derek park in his regular spot, much closer than she could hope as a resident, and led him to a service door that fed directly to one of the back stairwells. It was one of the little shortcuts and tricks discovered during residency to cut seconds off the frenzied jog demanded by the job. She was lucky that it was still unlocked. It was a real security problem to have an unattended door that opened straight into the heart of the hospital, but Seattle Grace had never had need to worry about things like that.

He left her in the stairwell with a quick kiss, the hair just above his collar still damp as she worked her fingers through it, off to change back into scrubs. She jogged up the stairs, stopping at the top to peer through the little window in the door, then walked quickly down the hall. Evening had just begun and the floor was quiet, or as quiet as it ever was. She could hear the beep of monitors as she walked, patients slipping into sleep after a day of eager interns bursting through their doors and nurses poking and rolling them. The last door on the left was closed. Meredith let herself in and shut it quietly behind her.

"You look better," Meredith said, walking over to the bed and reading the monitors.

"I bet," Lexie replied, her eyelids drooping with sleep. "I don't know how, though, since I can't take a nap without someone crashing through here."

"One more night," Meredith said. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Do I have a choice?" Lexie said, her voice flat and caustic. "I just want out of here."

"We can do that." Meredith sat on the edge of the bed.

"I don't have a lot of stuff," Lexie said. "I was staying with this guy, and I crashed wherever. I have a couple bags there, if he didn't throw out my stuff thinking I died or something."

"We'll go get them," Meredith said.

"All I need is a couch, maybe borrow some books if you have them," Lexie said.

"A bed," Meredith said, "and a bedroom." She paused for a moment, taking in her sister. "You like to read?"

"It's just about the only thing I'm good at." Lexie said.

Meredith knew her time was running out, that she had to leave if she wanted this to go smoothly. "When did they say they would discharge you?"

"Jackson said he would be in right after rounds. He also wants you to call him." Lexie said. "Is there something going on there?" Her face brightening slightly, "I know you're all like, super busy, but that guy is pretty hot."

"What?" Meredith asked. "No. Nothing is going on."

"Too bad," Lexie said.

"He probably just wants to talk about your case," Meredith said. "He seems a little attached."

Lexie grunted, unconvinced.

"I need you to be ready tomorrow morning," Meredith said. "We're leaving as soon as they will let us."

"Hallelujah," Lexie said, her voice back to the monotone rasp Meredith was getting used to. "See ya tomorrow, sis."

Meredith heard the door open behind her. Of course a nurse would come before she could make an escape. If she left immediately, though, she could be out of the hospital and back in her barren apartment by the time her mother learned of her presence. Before she could get her hopes up, however, she was frozen to the spot by the sound of the end of days itself speaking to her rigid back.

"I need to speak with you, Meredith," her mother said, her voice cool and controlled. "Privately."


End file.
